Dutroux denies killinghis ‘accomplice in murder’

14 April 2004

BRUSSELS – Convicted Belgian paedophile and alleged serial child killer Marc Dutroux on Wednesday denied murdering a former accomplice found buried alongside four girls in his garden.

Dutroux was speaking as his trial in the Belgian city of Arlon, on multiple charges of rapes, murders and kidnappings, resumed after a break for the Easter weekend.

The hearings on Wednesday centred on the circumstances of the death of Bernard Weinstein, believed to have aided Dutroux in the kidnappings of young girls and whose body was found in 1996 in the garden of one of Dutroux’s homes, near the city of Charleroi.

Police forensic experts judged that Weinstein, as well as two of the girl victims, had died from suffocation after being buried alive.

“I did not kill him (Weinstein), he was the only friend I had,” Dutroux told the court.

The court heard police evidence that a number of bottles of chloroform were found in one of Dutroux’s homes. He told the court that the chloroform was the property of his grand parents, who used it to kill their cats.

Dutroux has said his former wife, Michelle Martin, who is also on trial accused of helping Dutroux kidnap his victims, murdered Weinstein by slipping an overdose of the drug Rohypnol in his food.

Forensic experts testifying in court Wednesday dismissed the accusation against Martin as improbable due to both the vast quantity of pills required to cause respiratory weakness in Weinstein and the small dose of the drug found present in his corpse.

Martin, 44, turned on Dutroux, describing his denial of killing Weinstein as “abhorent”.

She told the court Dutroux visited her in hospital on 25 November 1995, just after she had given birth, and said: “I have news, one bad one good. The good news is that I’ve bought a mobile home. The bad is that I have had to eliminate Weinstein because he wanted to eliminate Julie and Melissa.”

Dutroux, 47, is accused of kidnapping eight year-olds Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo in June 1995 and imprisoning them in a dungeon below his house where he raped them before starving them to death.

Dutroux has accused Weinstein of allowing the two girls to starve to death early in 1996 while he was in jail for car theft.

French-born Weinstein was Dutroux’s accomplice for several robberies and is believed to have helped in the kidnapping of Julie and Melissa as well as the imprisonment and murder of two other girls, who were buried alive.

The trial, expected to last into May, continues Thursday.

[Copyright Expatica News 2004]

Subject: Belgian news