Danish authorities are investigating whether a man who confessed to killing nine people in France and Belgium also raped an 11-year-old girl in Denmark.
French forest warden Mr Michel Fourniret returned to prison in Belgium at the weekend after showing police where to dig for two bodies buried in the grounds of a chateau in France where he used to live with his family.
Local media in Denmark said an 11-year-old girl was the victim of a particularly violent rape on a beach in southern Denmark in 1999 and that a witness description of the perpetrator and subsequent artist's sketch resembled Mr Fourniret.
"We have sent the DNA to Belgium and France and expect an answer within a week," said a police spokesman from Falster Island in southern Denmark.
Dubbed the "Ogre of the Ardennes", after the wooded region along the French-Belgian border, Mr Fourniret (62) has confessed to kidnapping, raping and strangling 12-year-old Elisabeth Brichet and killing eight other people, most of them girls.
French forensic experts will conduct autopsies tomorrow to formally identify the bodies found at the suspect's chateau near the Belgian border. They are believed to be those of Ms Brichet, a Belgian who disappeared in 1989, and Frenchwoman Jeanne-Marie Desramault, who vanished the same year at age 22.
Fourniret had been in Belgian custody for a year on charges of trying to kidnap a girl, but he only confessed last week to the nine killings committed between 1987-2001 after his estranged wife accused him of the deaths.
Police plan to investigate an accusation by Fourniret's wife that he killed the family's au pair in 1993 in the Belgian town of Sart-Custinne. Fourniret has denied the accusation.