A Nightmare Revisited

He has festered in a cell for more than seven years without trial, but judgement day for Belgium's most hated man - paedophile Marc Dutroux - is finally close at hand. On March 1, the bearded electrician who has become a symbol of everything that is rotten in Belgium's anarchic and incompetent judicial and police system will at last stand trial.

The charges against him are wearily familiar to the country's jaded public and could not be more serious. Dutroux is said to have kidnapped and abused six girls aged between eight and 19 and killed four of them. He is also alleged to have murdered an accomplice.

The crimes he is charged with were carried out with a particularly high level of sadism and apparent indifference to human suffering. Two of his alleged victims - Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeune, both eight - were sexually abused and tortured in in metal cages in a makeshift dungeon in his basement. Their bodies were later found buried in Dutroux's garden in southern Belgium. They had starved to death while Dutroux did a short stint in jail for theft.

Two other girls - An Marchal, 17 and Eefje Lambrecks, 19 - also met their end in his custody. Their decomposed corpses were discovered at another of his houses.

Laetitia Delhez, who was then 14, and Sabine Dardenne who now works in a factory, escaped with their lives but will never be the same again.

The authorities' handling of the case has been characterised by an appalling litany of legal, ethical and procedural errors. When Dutroux was eventually arrested and incarcerated in 1996, the police were forced to admit that he was no stranger to them. He had been sentenced to 13 years in prison for child rape in 1989 but was released after just three years for good behaviour.

Police had also searched the house where Julie and Melissa were hidden three times but failed to find them. On one occasion they even heard cries for help but accepted Dutroux's claim that the noise was coming from children playing in the street.

In 1998 the humiliation was completed for the police when Dutroux - supposed to be Belgium's best-guarded prisoner - briefly escaped custody. To add insult to injury, it emerged recently that he was allowed to correspond romantically for two years with a 15-year old school girl from his prison cell and to groom her.

The public have also had to watch with horror in recent years as Dutroux mounted an ultimately unsuccessful bid for release on the grounds that he had been held for too long without trial and in inhumane conditions. Crucial evidence has disappeared, several prosecutors, policemen and important witnesses have committed suicide and the parents of the victims themselves have been subjected to often appalling treatment at the hands of the authorities.

Dutroux claims he procured the girls for the sexual gratification of a network of senior establishment figures and that a massive cover-up is underway. Some believe him, but most prefer to think he was a depraved lone predator.

He also claims that some of the deaths were accidental or committed by someone else.

With his long-awaited trial so tantalisingly close, Belgium is currently re-living Dutroux's alleged crimes in a kind of surreal time warp. More than seven years may have elapsed but to look at the media you would think they had only just heard of "the monster of Marcinelle" as he has been dubbed. His bearded face stares out from newsagents' hoardings, newspapers carry enormous feature articles on the case every day and the tabloid press in particular is having a field day raking over the case's morbid and horrific detail.

Dutroux's trial is a prime opportunity for Belgium that should not be squandered. His alleged crimes have traumatised the country more than any other event since the second world war and the country's spectacular failure to bring him to justice in a reasonable timeframe has become an embarrassing stain on it's conscience.

The trial will be a chance to exorcise old demons, but it will also be a chance for Belgium to prove that it can do something right in the Dutroux affair. It cannot afford to get it wrong again.