#IPICTURE REGINA VOSS TRIAL#

In October 1996, Connerotte, the only man who has ever advanced the Dutroux investigation, was sacked from the case. If true, it placed Dutroux and Nihoul, suspected accomplices in the latest child abductions, together at the scene of similar crimes 10 years before.

At these events Nihoul was a sort of party beast while Dutroux was more on the side.' 'Dutroux was a boy who brought drugs, cocaine to these parties - he brought some girls, watched girls. Also there, she said, was the young Dutroux. He abused children in a very sadistic way', she said. One of the regular organisers of these parties, she claimed, was the man she knew as 'Mich', Jean Michel Nihoul, 'a very cruel man. It involved sadism, torture and even murder, and again she described the places, the victims and the ways they were killed. This 'entertainment' was not just sex, she told the police. She gave the police the names by which she knew these men, detailed the houses, apartments and districts where she'd been taken with other children to entertain the guests.

She described certain regular clients including judges, one of the country's most powerful politicians (now dead) and a prominent banker. In 1996 she related her experiences to a police team under carefully filmed and supervised conditions. He would collect her from school and take her away for weekends to sex parties where she was 'given' to other men and secretly filmed having sex with them. She told investigators how from the age of 12 she'd been 'given' by her parents to a family friend, Tony Van den Bogaert, who'd had a key to their house. Louf was the first of 10 to come forward. Connerotte, the man who had arrested Dutroux and saved two teenage girls from his dungeon, was a hero in Belgium. Louf came forward after Judge Connerotte made an appeal to victims of paedophiles to tell police what they knew. Every documentary likes a monster but we don't pay for interviews and frankly I'd already had enough.īut we did need to offer Nihoul a right to reply to the accusations made by Regina Louf, a woman now aged 33 whose testimony has divided Belgium. The Monster of Belgium denies he's a paedophile but seemed to enjoy his notoriety and demanded £1,000 for his story. He will never come to court, he said, because the information he has about important people in Belgium would bring the government down. During the course of our meal he, apparently playfully, grabbed me, tickling, and finally pulled me over on to him in the restaurant booth until I had to appeal to my colleagues for rescue.

#IPICTURE REGINA VOSS TRIAL#

He is confident he will never come to trial and that the evidence against him will never be heard by any jury. 'I am the Monster of Belgium,' he roared at me by way of greeting.

I met Nihoul in a restaurant in Brussels. But, as the network began to unravel, Lelievre suddenly stopped co-operating, saying he had been threatened. The judge investigating the case, Jean-Marc Connerotte, believed Nihoul was the brains behind the operation. While they had been in prison, Lelievre told police, Dutroux and Nihoul met frequently in the exercise yard, making plans. The chief suspect was Jean Michel Nihoul, a Brussels businessman, pub-owner and familiar face at sex parties. An accomplice, Michel Lelievre - a drug addict and petty thief - told police soon after his arrest that the girls had been kidnapped to order, for someone else. They were buried in the garden of another of Dutroux's homes. Months later Dutroux led police to the emaciated bodies of Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo, the two eight-year-olds who had been kidnapped more than a year before. She told police she visited the house to feed their dogs while her husband was in jail on car-theft charges, but she was 'too frightened' to feed the girls. But far from being investigated, leads pointing to a network seem rather to have been ignored or buried.ĭutroux's wife, Michele Martin, a former primary school teacher and the mother of his three children, has admitted that, in 1995, she knew two small girls were incarcerated without food or water in a secret dungeon in the cellar of a house they owned in Charleroi. The official explanation for the delay is that hysterical conspiracy theories forced investigators to search for paedophile networks which didn't exist. With each successive year in jail without trial their case against the Belgian authorities for a breach of human rights grows stronger. It's a system which today appears paralysed, unable to prosecute the accused, his wife and an alleged accomplice. Early on, I was told by one senior government adviser: 'You must not underestimate the terrible record of our Belgian justice system.' I have spent the last six months making a documentary about the investigation.

Ipicture regina voss