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Justice minister inspects court where French ‘serial killer’ goes on trial

   REIMS, France, March 21, 2008  – France’s justice minister on Thursday
inspected the courthouse where self-confessed serial killer Michel Fourniret
goes on trial next week for murdering seven young women.
   Rachida Dati said during her trip to the northeastern town of
Charleville-Mezieres that the state would provide extra funding to ensure that
the victims’ families are properly cared for during the trial expected to last
two months.
   "For too long we have neglected the victims in trials as serious as this
one," said Dati, who also visited the prison in the town where Fourniret and
his wife and suspected accomplice Monique Olivier are being held.
   Last week Fourniret was charged with two more killings including that of a
British woman.
   Monique Olivier was separately charged with complicity in the kidnappings
and murders.
   Fourniret and Olivier go on trial in Charleville-Mezieres in the Ardennes
region bordering Belgium next Thursday for seven murders committed in France and Belgium between 1987 and 2001.
   Fourniret has confessed to carrying out six of the killings.
   Arrested in Belgium in 2003 after an attempt to kidnap a 13-year-old girl,
Fourniret is accused of murdering six young women in France and one in
Belgium, aged between 12 and 22. He is also charged on several counts of rape.
   Dubbed the "Monster of the Ardennes" by French and Belgian media, Fourniret
has already served time behind bars for voyeurism and assault. It was there he
met Olivier, a volunteer prison visitor.
   The murders date from the year of his release from that prison term, when
he settled in a village near the central French town of Auxerre.
   Olivier’s confessions to Belgian investigators in June 2004 led to the
charges against Fourniret.
   Two of the bodies were found buried on a country estate in northern France
that he and Olivier had bought.
   In July 2006 he led investigators to the remains of one of his suspected
victims, 17-year-old Isabelle Laville, who was raped and murdered in 1987 and
whose body was dumped down a well.

AFP