BELGIUM: The bodies of two girls were found in Liège yesterday, ending a frantic two-week search by police that has reopened a debate on paedophilia in Belgium.
Police confirmed the recovered bodies were the stepsisters Stacy Lemmens (7) and Nathalie Mahy (10), who went missing from a street party in the city on the night of June 9th.
The bodies were recovered close to a railway line, just a few hundred metres from the bar in Liège where the girls where last seen alive. Media reports suggest that Stacy's body was found first, under a sewer cap, and the second little girl was recovered soon after.
An autopsy is being carried out by the Belgian authorities, who are expected to announce the first results today on the exact cause of death.
Liège prosecutor Cédric Visart de Bocarmé said Stacy and Nathalie had been murdered and their bodies had been recovered in a storm drain among dense undergrowth. He said the questioning of the chief suspect in the case, Abdallah Aid Oud (39) - who has two previous convictions for child rape - did not help police to find the bodies.
Mr Aid Oud has been charged with the girls' kidnapping and has been held by police since handing himself in on June 13th after seeing his photograph displayed on television during a World Cup match. He denies any involvement in the girls' disappearance.
He was the boyfriend of a waitress in the pub where the parents of Stacy and Nathalie were drinking on the night of the girls' disappearance. Police say he was seen in the area shortly before the girls were missed by relatives and raised the alarm.
During the investigation Liège police commissioner Jacques Leonard labelled Mr Aid Oud a "psychopath with no sense of right or wrong". He was released in December after serving a sentence for his latest child-sex offence.
The disappearance of the girls has dominated media headlines for the past two weeks and revived memories of the infamous Belgian paedophile Marc Dutroux. In 1995 Dutroux kidnapped two girls from Liège, imprisoned them in a dungeon in his home, sexually abused them and let them starve to death in a case that shocked the nation and exposed major deficiencies in the police investigation.
It took almost 10 years to bring Dutroux to trial, during which time he sexually abused a further four girls. The case prompted a change of government and an overhaul of the Belgian police and prosecution services.
The disappearance of Stacy and Nathalie sparked a massive nationwide search and the girls' pictures were posted in shop and cafe windows around the country. It also sparked an intense debate on the laws governing the release of paedophiles into the community and tougher measures to enable police to conduct investigations.
Some tough child-protection proposals made in the wake of the Dutroux case, such as setting up a DNA register of sex offenders and alerting mayors to the location of paedophiles released in their areas, were not introduced in Belgium. Several commentators have called for these and other tough measures to be introduced.
Meanwhile, in a statement yesterday Elio Di Rupo, premier of the French-speaking Wallonia region, said the discovery of the bodies marked "a new black day for Belgium". Crown Prince Philippe, the heir to the Belgian throne, said he was scaling back a trade visit to Moscow as a sign of respect for the girls' families.
"As parents ourselves we want to express our feelings with the parents," he said.