How many bodies were buried in the cellars of 54 rue Vandermaelan in central Brussels is still unclear. One or two, certainly, but probably more. The bones had been chopped up with an axe and their reassembly will take some time. Nor do investigators yet know the source of flesh found in a freezer.

Yesterday police found more bones as they concluded their digging in the two cellars of the first of the three houses owned or controlled by Pastor Andras Pandy (70). The next house to be searched has eight cellars.

There is still no trace of either of his wives or four of their children, but Pandy, charged with their murders, is still protesting his innocence in his prison cell. A picture of this strange man of God has begun to emerge, however; quiet-spoken and articulate to strangers, but an authoritarian bully to his wives and family, a sexually voracious predator who advertised for partners in the Hungarian press, an abuser of his own children. Evidence also points to him being a clever liar who prepared an elaborate disinformation campaign to cover his tracks.

It's been a rough week for Belgium: the anniversary of last year's huge "white march" has been marked by the grisly finds in Brussels, new evidence of police indifference in the hunt for Marc Dutroux, and the publication of a major report on a series of unrelated killings in the 1980s which points again to gross bureaucratic incompetence on the part of the authorities.

Responding to the overwhelming sense among families that little has been done to meet their grievances, King Albert II met families on Thursday, an unusually political gesture by the monarch. Experts presented a new action plan for enhancing children's rights, particularly their access to justice, which parents promised to study.

The sad case of Pastor Pandy's extended dysfunctional family has come to light because of a trawl through some of the 1980s files. A refugee from Hungary in 1956, Pandy established himself first as a pastor to the Hungarian emigre community and then as a teacher of religion in Flemish schools.

He married Ilona Sores the same year and had three children by her. They were divorced in 1967. Today, two of those children are missing as well as their mother, and their sister Agnes is her father's main accuser.

In 1984 he founded a cultural society known as Club Ydnap (his own name backwards) which he controlled with members of his family. It enabled him to raise sufficient cash to buy two houses, in one of which the bones were found.

In 1986 Pandy went to the local Molenbeek police to complain that his second wife, Edith Fintor, whom he had married seven years before, had deserted him and gone to live in Germany. She has not been seen since.

In February 1992 an officer of the Judicial Police, Guy Collignon, was approached by a friend of his wife's.

She introduced him to Agnes Pandy, who made allegations of incest against her father but also expressed concern about the disappearance in the late 1980s of her mother and several members of her extended family.

The police took evidence from her for a total of seven hours over two days.

Among the conversations she told police about was her father's brutal response to her demand to know where her mother had gone: "She burned."

Mr Collignon and his superior agreed the case needed further investigation and passed on the file. But neither was aware that as early as 1989 a Dutch pastor had written to the police and Queen Fabiola over the disappearance of Pandy's second wife, Edith. The letters are understood to have been examined and a missing person's report filed. Yet in corresponding with Pandy he elicited the response that she was seriously ill and might die.

Nor were they aware that in the same year work on the canal beside one of Pandy's homes unearthed human bones. No connection was made at the time with the pastor.

In 1992, however, Pandy was questioned. He denied everything, accusing his daughter of jealousy and being a member of a sect. And he produced up to 20 letters from those who were supposed to be missing and a Hungarian woman friend to say that she had seen them personally in each of the last three years.

In August the incest file was closed, and a few months later the whole file was marked "no further action".

During this period Pandy traveled regularly to Hungary "to find a new wife" and was well known in his small home village of Dunakeszi, 30 miles north of Budapest.

According to a local police captain, Lajos Kovacs, Pandy had made contact with his second wife by advertising in a local paper and he does not rule out the possibility that others responded to the same ad, a suggestion confirmed by Agnes. Police in Brussels believe some of the women may have agreed to write the letters from Hungary posing as the missing family.

Mr Kovacs says Pandy had forced his second wife to leave Hungary by kidnapping her daughter. But searches of Pandy's property in Hungary have so far failed to find any evidence of wrongdoing.

Istvan Steszek, a retired pastor in the Hungarian Protestant church in Belgium, this week described his former colleague as extremely authoritarian in relation to his family and colleagues.

"We often had the impression that his wife was not only his wife but also his servant and slave," Mr Steszek said, adding that Pandy's rigid disciplinarianism had contributed to the closure of the church's Belgian branch.

Mr Steszek also gave further credence to growing fears that Pandy may have had other victims. The pastor has confirmed that Pandy had made contact with around 20 women in the earlier 1990s after he had advertised for a third wife in Hungarian newspapers.

"He brought one of them, a pretty blonde teacher, about 50, to Belgium two years ago and she has not been heard of since." Hungarian police have opened an inquiry into the woman's disappearance, Mr Steszek said.

The Hungarian papers, fascinated by the story, quote neighbours describing him as a quietspoken man who came regularly to his small cabin, often with women. According to one man he did not drink or smoke but had "a formidable sexual appetite and was mad about women". Others reported that he took every opportunity to meet women and would talk of little else.

Two sisters of one of his wives told Hungarian papers that "we never believed they had a normal married life. Andras was very aggressive towards his wife and we knew him as a fiendish man."

Two other women from Dunakeszi, Katarin and Margrit, sisters in their 50s, tell a strange story of a visit to Brussels recently when they spent a week "imprisoned" in the pastor's Brussels home. He told his guests their Hungarian would cause difficulties and insisted they remain indoors during their stay.

By the end of the week both women were fed up and insisted he bring them back to Hungary. Pandy reluctantly agreed.

In Brussels the searches continue, helped by the arrival next week of Supt John Bennett, whose experience of Gloucester's "house of horrors" is expected to be important.

It is painstaking work. "In effect we are sifting the sand like archaeologists," one of the police searchers explains."We then take out the larger pieces of bone, after photographing them, for examination. Then the sand is again sieved to find other fragments of things like teeth . . ."