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Beyond the Dutroux Affair
the victim-witnesses | the investigators | the accused | the apparently assassinated
Warning: The information in this article is not suited for anyone below the age of 18, as it involves extreme sexual violence against children. A certain amount of normally-illegal visual evidence (it is censored) has been included.
Belgium's biggest secret.
- Former CIA director and Cercle member William Colby giving advice to his friend senator John DeCamp, urging him to quit his investigations into the Franklin child abuse affair and to write a book about his experiences (The Franklin Coverup, 2nd edition, foreword).
"From East Belfast's Kincora Boys' Home, via Leicestershire, Staffordshire and London, to the children's homes of Clwyd, we have witnessed 25 years of cover-up. Cover-up, not to protect the
- June 6, 1996, The Guardian, 'True scandal of the child abusers'. These lines were written by the author of the article and are not quotes.
"I look at him [inspector De Baets], and I really want to believe him, but somewhere, I know that I will never make it. The people I have known are too powerful, too influential, too untouchable. I realize that; the investigators not yet."
- Victim-witness Regina Louf (X1) from Belgium describes her thoughts when she first began to testify in secret in September 1996 (1998, 'Zwijgen is voor Daders,' p. 203).
| Part 1 | Foreword |
| Part 2 | Where things began: Dutroux's reign of terror |
| Part 3 | Failure to catch Dutroux |
| Part 4 | Nihoul |
| Part 5 | Victim-witnesses come forward |
| Part 6 | Questioning the alters |
| Part 7 | A sniff of extreme abuse |
| Part 8 | Girls X1 had witnessed being murdered |
| Part 9 | Who backed up the claims of X1 |
| Part 10 | Dismantling the investigation |
| Part 11 | Questionable and extremely compromised researchers |
| Part 12 | The accused in finance |
| Part 13 | The accused in (private) intelligence and politics |
| Part 14 | The US connection continued |
| Part 15 | More on the Satanic link and the biggest picture possible |
| Part 16 | Conclusion |
"Imagine, everywhere you hear that story about a blackmail dossier in which organizations of the extreme right are in the possession of pictures and videos on which a number of prominent people in and around Brussels have sex with young girls; minors it is said. The existence of this dossier has always been vehemently denied. Until it was proven that testimonies and videos of this affair indeed were in the possession of the police services. An officer of the judicial police (Marnette, H.G.) denied the existence of these videos, while afterwards this person's superior admitted that they did exist, that they were kept with the judicial police in Brussels, but that they were completely worthless. Strange, because this stuff needs to be deposited with the registrar and not be kept in the possession of some police service. Subsequently, examining magistrate Jean-Marie Schlicker confirms that this dossier does indeed exist, but that he wishes not to give any testimonies about it. The at first non-existing dossier turns out to exist. The videos without substance then turn out to be interesting enough after all to be handed over to the examining magistrate tasked with the investigation into the Gang of Nijvel. But this person subsequently is afraid to testify about that! What do you think that has been going on here?"
-September 1989, Congressman Hugo Coveliers, secretary of the special investigating committee tasked with evaluating the way gangsterism and terrorism is combated in Belgium (1988-1990), to Humo magazine (1990, Hugo Gijsels, 'De Bende & Co', p. 133-134). Coveliers became a senator in 1995.
"When I saw in how much trouble he got [sergeant Michel Clippe, who had convinced her to testify] and how my own dossier evolved, I decided to quit. In any case, even back then you could already see how the people surrounding De Baets were collectively being stonewalled. They didn't stand a chance."
- Victim-witness X2, a police officer. Because of her job she recognized many judges and attorneys among her former abusers. Certain names and details were also given by X1 and other witnesses (1999, 'De X-dossiers', p. 321).
"Only very few reporters are still listening to me, listen to my cry for help. They are not allowed to publish or broadcast. They all tell me that they are stonewalled by their bosses... The aggression of some of the magazines, newspapers and tv programs is frightening. This is not normal anymore, this is a war in which the victims have become disposable waste."
- Victim-witness Regina Louf (X1) about the media's reaction to the initially open-minded reports about the X1 case by De Morgen and Panorama in January 1998 (1998, 'Zwijgen is voor Daders,' p. 257).
Foreword
A number of Dutch and French language books have appeared on the Dutroux affair since 1996, with one standing out above the rest. This is the generally hard-to-get 1999 book 'The X-Dossiers', written by respected investigative journalists Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck. Page after page they explain how the most important aspects of the whole Dutroux investigation, in which Dutroux ultimately became a minor detail, were manipulated and finally discarded. The book presented the most powerful case possible for a massive cover up. However, there was one thing the authors couldn't do and that was to publish the names of those who had been accused by a whole range of witnesses. The reason is obvious: if the authors would have published these names they would have been paying damages for the rest of their lives..
A lot of information in this article can be found in the book 'The X-Dossiers', with the primary difference being that all the names of the alleged abusers have been included. This has become possible because the Dutroux dossier, including the testimonies of the X-witnesses, were leaked to a number of reporters in the late 1990s. Both the final Dutroux dossier, which has largely been sanitized from any important information, and a summary of official reports from August 1996 to May-June 1997 have been used by this author to verify the claims made in a number of books and to find out the identities of the alleged abusers. Seeing the names and reading the biographies can be quite a shock initially, but it will also clarify how a cover up of this magnitude was possible.
The power of the Dutroux affair and its X-Dossiers is that it will enable anyone to see how a state can be controlled and undermined by a cabal that is able to place its own members in crucial positions in any investigation that might lead to its own exposure. The question of why the majority of the media is so cooperative is the only aspect that cannot be fully explained in this article, although it can be shown that the media is willingly working with official investigators in manipulating and debunking all aspects of an investigation that are not appreciated by the cabal.
Some might find it unethical to publish the names of mere suspects, especially when talking about child abuse. The author fully agrees with this argument, but only under normal circumstances in which an investigation is carried out the way it should be. This has not happened in the Dutroux affair, in which the honest, competent and dedicated researchers, together with the most important witnesses, have unjustly been persecuted, harassed, tarred and feathered by the media and the judiciary, with help from some of the alleged child abusers. That's why the investigation, which has been dead and buried for many years now, should be taken public. And let's not forget that the X-Dossiers involve a whole range of witnesses whose claims overlap and in many cases involve highly specific details that have been verified by detectives. It can also be argued that the mainstream press was anything but discrete in late 1996 when they published the names of the politicians Elio Di Rupo and Jean-Pierre Grafe as alleged child abusers. The evidence these claims were based on was meager to say the least and many times less powerful than the combined testimonies of the X-witnesses. But, of course, the purpose of this event was not to inform the public; it was an effort to discredit the rumors about high level involvement in child abuse networks. It was known that sooner or later the X-witnesses would reach the news and this was one of the pre-emptive strikes against these witnesses.
Several appendixes have been attached to this article. Most of these appendixes, which include long lists of accused, victims, investigators and apparently assassinated, were more or less finished before a beginning was made with writing this article. It has actually taken about 1,5 years to fill in all the biographies and translate the necessary passages of all the Dutch and French sources used, but this was definitely worth the effort as it gave tremendous insight in what has been going on in Belgium since the late 1970s, and provided some perspective to reports that have come from the United States and elsewhere. It might be the last thing you'd expect from a country with only ten million inhabitants, but Belgium's history of internal subversion takes quite a while to get through.
Where things began: Dutroux's reign of terror
In the afternoon of August 13, 1996, progress was finally made. A number of individuals were arrested on strong suspicions that they had been responsible for a wave of kidnappings of young girls. Within days these suspicions were backed up with solid evidence, but the arrest of Dutroux and some of his associates turned out to be only the beginning of the biggest scandal in Belgian history.
The media attention had begun in June 1995 with the disappearance of two 8 year old girls, Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo. Almost exactly two months later, the 17 year old An Marchal and the 19 year old Eefje Lambrecks went missing. Additional media attention was drawn to the latter case as the last thing these girls did was visit the show of Rasti Rostelli, a prominent magician, in which they had been hypnotized. Needless to say, the affair ended the career of the magician, even though he had almost immediately been cleared as a suspect. In late 1995, the BOB (Belgian FBI and branch of the gendarmerie) largely ceased to investigate the case. However, the disappearance of An and Eefje remained prominent, because a foundation named Marc & Corinne, set up several years earlier and named after two teenagers who had been brutally murdered, used its limited funds to spread posters of the girls' faces all over Belgium and the Netherlands. In the end this made no difference; the girls weren't found, nor those responsible, and in May 1996 history repeated itself. This time the 12 year old Sabine Dardenne disappeared, and again the BOB was unable to find the kidnappers or the girl. People became more worried for their children with every kidnapping. Confidence in the police and judiciary, traditionally already quite low, began sinking to new depths.
Things changed later that year. On Friday, August 9, 1996 the 14 year old Laetitia Delhez disappeared in Bertrix, a town located in the district of Neufchateau, near the border of France and Luxemburg. Michel Bourlet, prosecutor of the king in Neufchateau, was tasked with the case and appointed examining magistrate Jacques Langlois to coordinate the investigation. When Langlois left for vacation the following Monday, Bourlet replaced him with his close colleague Jean-Marc Connerotte. The latter duo had already become well known in 1994 for not being allowed to solve the murder on Andre Cools, a socialist politician.
The same monday that Connerotte took over from Langlois, BOB adjutant Jean-Pierre Peters reported a breakthrough in the investigation. Of the several dozen tips, two turned out to be very useful. Two witnesses had seen an old white van driving around Bertrix the day Laetitia disappeared. In one of these two cases a student was afraid the driver of the van was planning to steal his bike. As luck would have it, the 22-year-old had a passion for cars and reported to the police the exact type of van and a good chunk of its license plate, as the first three letters reminded him of the name of his sister. In no time Dutroux's name, a known pedophile, came out of the computer. A crisis meeting was held in Bertrix that evening and the following day Dutroux, his wife Michele Martin, and his sidekick Michel Lelievre were arrested. In the following days their testimonies led to the retrieval of two girls, Sabine and Laetitia, in Dutroux's basements. Belgium's case of the century was about to begin.
Failure to catch Dutroux
In the following months and years details came out about the failure of the police and BOB to catch Dutroux in an earlier stage. Although usually not presented in such a way, most of these rather odd failures can be ascribed to BOB officer Rene Michaux.
As head of Operation Othello, a surveillance operation against Dutroux from August 10, 1995 to January 1996, he practically knew everything there was to know about this already convicted, violent pedophile. From all sides evidence was presented to him that Dutroux not only had kidnapped Julie and Melissa, but also An and Eefje. However, Michaux ignored evidence presented by such informants as Claude Thirault, to whom Dutroux had mentioned how to kidnap young girls and how much you could get for them; Dutroux's mother, who had gathered evidence from her son's neighbors that he was likely involved in the kidnappings; and police officer Christian Dubois, who early on was on the trail of the gang of Nihoul, which would immediately have led to Dutroux.
In between all these reports, the video cameras aimed at Dutroux's Marcinelle home as part of Operation Othello failed to register Dutroux bringing in An and Eefje on August 22, nor would Michaux's team notice Eefje's failed escape attempt on August 25, in which she briefly climbed out the bathroom window to shout for help. An and Eefje were taken out of the house in September and murdered.
When finally forced to search Dutroux's Marcinelle home for reasons not related to the kidnappings, Michaux decided to ignore the voices of two young girls, seemingly not even trying to get a response from them. He also didn't think that Dutroux's odd L-shaped basement, with one wall much newer than all the others, was reason enough to tear it down, nor did he recognize the significance of such items as vaginal cream, a speculum, chains, and a videotape with the name of a program on it dealing with missing children. Two other videos which would have shown Dutroux working on his basement and him raping a 14 year old girl were returned to Dutroux's wife, apparently without having been reviewed by his team. This failure of properly searching Dutroux's home apparently led to the death of Julie and Melissa, who are believed to have died from starvation in Dutroux's basement. It also led to the kidnapping of Sabine and Laetitia after Dutroux got out of jail in March 1996.
| In August 1996, after Dutroux had been arrested on suspicions that he had kidnapped Laetitia, Michaux led another three hour search in Dutroux's Marcinelle home where at that moment Sabine and Laetitia were located. Needless to say, Michaux not only failed to find | ||
| the girls, which could possibly have led to the release of Dutroux, he also hadn't noticed the letters Sabine had hidden under Dutroux's carpet. Luckily, the location of the girls would be pointed out by Dutroux 48 hours later, after it had become clear to him there was no way out this time, especially not with his lackey Michel Lelievre spilling the beans. These failures of Michaux led to strong criticism from the parents of An Marchal, who went to inspect Dutroux's basement themselves. The parents of Melissa Russo filed an official complaint against him. When Bourlet criticized Michaux in 2004 over his failure to even find Sabine's |  Rene Michaux, one of the world's most incompetent police officers. | |
| letters, and seemingly implied this might not have been unintentional, Michaux could only react by calling Bourlet a "liar" and stating that "he sure wouldn't have found Laetitia under the carpet." These intellectual replies were soon followed by threats to sue for libel. Michaux's extreme incompetence was rewarded with a new position as a local police commissioner. | ||
Following is a brief recap of Dutroux's life and how extraordinarily incompetent the judiciary had to be to allow him to go on kidnapping girls.
- Dutroux's had a long history of physically abusing women.
- Convicted in November 1988 for kidnapping, photographing, torturing and raping five girls between the age of 11 and 19. Also convicted for torturing an older woman by putting a razor in her vagina. He tried to force her into giving him money.
- In April 1992, PSC Minister of Justice Melchior Wathelet approved Dutroux's release from prison. Although it is normal in Belgium to be released after a third of the sentence has been served out, many in the system who worked with Dutroux did not agree with this decision. Dutroux was known to them as a manipulative psychopath without any regrets for his crimes. In fact, he never even admitted to them. Interestingly, Wathelet would be accused in the X-Dossiers of being a violent child abuser himself, together with some of his known proteges and associates (1).
- After his release, Dutroux received an unusually large amount of sleeping pills and sedatives from his doctor, which he would later use to quiet the girls he abducted (2).
- In his house in Marcinelle, near Charleroi, where he lived most of the time, Dutroux began constructing a concealed dungeon in the basement. In early 1993, the unemployed, small-time criminal Claude Thirault, who rented one of Dutroux's homes, was hired by Dutroux as a handyman to install water drains beneath one of his newly-bought houses. Although Thirault thought this was a bit unusual, he didn't mind doing it. But a few days into the job two girls walked past the house they were working on, prompting Dutroux to remark to Thirault: "If you want to kidnap them, you'll make 150,000 franks [about 4000 euro]... Grab them from behind, put a sedative drug under their nose, pull them into the car, and lock the doors." (3) Dutroux went on to explain how he had plans to abduct girls, lock them up in his basement and transport them abroad (4). Thirault, an occasional police informant, went to the police, and as a result Dutroux's houses were searched some months later, in December, the official reason being that he was suspected of a car theft. The police officers noticed Dutroux's modified basement, but did not find any girls. His house was searched again in June 1994 and it appeared to the officers that he had stopped working on the basement.
- In June 1995, Dutroux was sued for having illegally widened an opening to his basement in an effort to put in a venting tube (5).
- Thirault went back to the police after Julie and Melissa had disappeared to remind them of Dutroux's ideas about kidnapping girls and the modifications to his basement. The police got back to Thirault a few days later and asked him if he had some more solid evidence, apparently needed if the house of this known pedophile was to be searched (6).
- On June 24, 1995, examining magistrate Martine Doutrewe became head of the 'Julie and Melissa cell', tasked with finding the missing girls. Unfortunately for the girls, Doutrewe left for vacation in Italy within days of being assigned to this post and would not return until early August 9 (38 years old at the time; suffered from cancer and had already planned to recover from an operation; died in 1999; in 1995, her husband was under investigating for having embezzled millions of euros). No other permanent investigating judge was appointed in her place which significantly impacted the efficiency of the entire investigation (7). Doutrewe would never seriously get involved with the BOB operation that was to monitor Dutroux's daily activities. The magistrate also never tried to arrange a phone tap, a search warrant or approval for a financial investigation (8).
- On August 10, 1995, a group of BOB officers began monitoring Dutroux's movements under the code name Operation Othello. A time lapse video camera was used less than 2% of the total observation period (9) and operations were suspended at 10 o'clock each evening (10). The operation was so ineffective that on August 22, Dutroux was able to kidnap An and Eefje and lock them up in his house -completely unnoticed. On August 25, Eefje managed to grab her clothes, crawl out of the bathroom window and shout for help. Although she was pulled back in by Dutroux within seconds, the observers never noticed anything. A few weeks later the girls were taken out of the house -again unnoticed- and murdered. Dutroux was also able to kidnap three teenagers he suspected of having double-crossed him and lock them up in his house without any cameras or observers noticing anything. In addition, Dutroux had murdered Bernhard Weinstein during the period that he was under observation.
- On September 4, 1995, Dutroux's mother, who advised against the 1992 release of her son, anonymously informed Rene Michaux, investigative head of Operation Othello, that the neighbors of Dutroux were very suspicious about his activities. Windows were blackened out, Dutroux was always making noise in the basement, the garden was filled with used car tires, and two girls "of 16 or 18 years old" had recently been seen in his garden. These girls had never been observed during daylight. This information somehow didn't make it to the investigating team that was working on the case of An and Eefje, who were 17 and 19 years old (11).
- On December 6, 1995, Dutroux was arrested for having been involved in stealing a truck and kidnapping and torturing three teenagers he suspected of having restolen the vehicle (one of the teenagers had escaped and informed the police). Under the leadership of gendarme officer Rene Michaux, Dutroux's homes were searched on December 13 and again on December 19. One or more children were heard crying by Michaux and the locksmith (this person did not know anything about Dutroux being a suspect in the kidnapping of girls) accompanying him. They went to look in the basement, which clearly had a whole section which had recently been modified (12), but couldn't find anything, leading Michaux to conclude that the voices must have come from outside (13). The parents of Julie Lejeune, one of the children that was locked up there at the time, would later prove that normal communication was possible with someone locked up in one of the cells (14). Additionally, during the December 13 search of Dutroux's basement, Michaux found vaginal cream, chloroform, a speculum (medical instrument used to dilate bodily orifices) and chains, which to him were no cause for alarm. Videos were confiscated, which showed Dutroux working on his basement and raping a number of (unknown) girls. On one of the tapes the text "Perdu de Vue, Marc" was written, a reference to the tv program 'Lost From Sight' which dealt with missing children, and on which Julie and Melissa had also featured. Michaux and team never watched the tapes and gave them back to Dutroux's wife, Michele Martin (15).
- In the afternoon of December 13, after the disastrous search in Dutroux's Marcinelle home, Michaux met with police officer Christian Dubois. Both had been working on a recent phenomenon involving occupants of white Mercedesses following and photographing schoolgirls. On this occasion, Dubois informed Michaux that he had an informant who had stated that the white Mercedesses belonged to a pedophile network centered around a company called Achats Services Commerces (ASCO; not to be confused with X1's abuse and snuff factory) located in the Brussels' suburbs. According to the informant, the occupants of the white Mercedesses were putting together catalogs of pictures of children. Their clients could pick one of these kids, which would then be kidnapped, locked up in Belgium for a while, and then exported to eastern Europe or Thailand. The price for each child would be about 7500 euros. During their conversation Michaux told Dubois about Dutroux. Dubois recalled: "I remember that Michaux told me that Dutroux went to countries in eastern Europe... The sums he mentioned for the kidnappings were similar to those given to me by my informant... Even today this still keeps me awake at night. I feel responsible. Afterwards, in 1996, I looked into Dutroux... You just felt it. This was the man we were looking for!" Michaux undertook no action and the Verwilghen Commission would later scratch its had why. ASCO turned out to be a highly interesting company. It was incorporated on July 2, 1991, primarily by Jean-Louis Delamotte, a friend and regular business partner of Michel Nihoul. Nihoul, Bernard Weinstein, Michel Lelievre and Michele Martin (not Dutroux) had all been spotted on a regular basis in the immediate surroundings of the company. People in the neighborhood had also noted that Nihoul was often surrounded by young negro girls and had the impression that these girls were on transit. Five mattresses and some baby milk were found inside the company's headquarters after it had gone bankrupt in 1994. Delamotte's company Soparauto, registered at the same address, owned 5 white mercedesses, all with French license plates, as had been reported (16). Delamotte would later also be pointed out as the thug who intimidated one of the X-witnesses (17) and possibly also the person who had looked after her.
- On March 20, 1996, Dutroux was released unusually early on "humanitarian reasons"; his wife was about to have a baby. Operation Othello, the program that was monitoring Dutroux's movements, had been shut down in January, because Dutroux was in jail. The operation was not revived after his release.
- In August 1996, Dutroux was finally caught by Michel Bourlet and Jean-Marc Connerotte. Sabine, one of two girls locked in the basement, had hidden letters under Dutroux's carpet. Michaux failed to find them, for which he would be criticized by Michel Bourlet in 2004 (18).
- Even though more than 10 years have passed since Dutroux was arrested on suspicions of having kidnapped Laetitia, largely because of Michaux it is still somewhat of a mystery how many videos were confiscated in late 1995 and in August 1996 (19). Initial reports after Dutroux's arrest stated that the justice department was in the possession of more than 300 videos (20); within several weeks this number was upped to 5,000 videos. Reports that Dutroux's accomplices, including a number of high level officials, could be seen on these tapes also began to appear (21). In the end, this seems to have been a huge exaggeration (22), even though the exact amount of videos remains a bit of a mystery (23). Most estimates today are below 100, and only a portion of these videos appear to have shown Dutroux abusing young girls.
Nihoul
One of the most important reasons for speculation about a network has been Michel Nihoul. This person had been arrested on August 16 after the investigators of Bourlet and Connerotte found out that on August 10, one day after Lelievre and Dutroux had kidnapped Laetitia, Nihoul had supplied Lelievre, free of charge, with 1,000 XTC pills. The original investigators immediately suspected that these pills served as a payment for the kidnapping of Laetitia, suspicions which were only fueled when Nihoul was unable to provide an alibi for August 8 (24), the day when at least 8 witnesses claim to have seen Nihoul in Bertrix at and around the location where Laetitia would be kidnapped the next day. Additionally, some of these witnesses claimed to have seen Nihoul in the presence of Dutroux (or his van), who was carrying out an initial surveillance that day (25). Both Dutroux's wife Michele Martin and Michel Lelievre specified that Dutroux, at least in some cases, kidnapped girls according to specific wishes of clients. Martin stated that one of these clients was Michel Nihoul.
Michele Martin, Dutroux's wife: "I have heard Marc personally telling Lelievre that he should bring a girl for Michel Nihoul. If I haven't mentioned that before, that is because I'm afraid of that gang, I mean Nihoul, Marc Dutroux and others in Brussels. I mean well-placed individuals who Nihoul knew. The connections of Nihoul made me fear for my children and myself... I was afraid, because Jean-Michel Nihoul, Marc Dutroux and Michel Lelievre were part of a gang that was involved in all kinds of business, like drugs, pills, girls and forged papers [PEHI note: for which Nihoul would later indeed be convicted, just as human trafficking]. I have to say that at the time of the kidnapping of Sabine and Laetitia, Michel Nihoul, as I already stated, often called to Sars, to my home. He was looking for Marc Dutroux. He didn't call for me. When Nihoul tried to reach Marc he always remained vague. I never knew why he called so often to Marc Dutroux. Over time I became more and more convinced that Marc Dutroux and Jean-Michel Nihoul did things that couldn't stand the light of day and which I was not supposed to know about." (26)
"By the way, Marc told me that he went more and more to Brussels and met an increasing number of people in light of his activities with Michel Nihoul... Nihoul always gave me the impression that he had many connections that he could count on. Marc Dutroux told me that Nihoul had taken care of many of Lelievre's problems: he had prevented that he was arrested, he had worked out his fines and solved his money problems. Marc had accurately sensed that he would benefit from continuing to see Nihoul, because of his connections and those of his wife, the lawyer. The more they saw each other, the more they opened up of course. I think that at a certain moment a mutual trust was built. I see evidence of that in a conversation between Lelievre and Marc that I coincidentally heard and in which Dutroux said that they had to bring back a girl for Nihoul. I think that Jean-Michel had influence on Marc Dutroux. Marc often told me that he was impressed by the connections Nihoul had." (27)
| Michel Lelievre: "Marc always told me that he kidnapped girls for people who had placed an order with him. When he came out of prison in March 1996, I asked him who did the orders when he was in jail. He answered me that somebody else did that and that he certainly wasn't the only one. When we went to pick up a girl, Marc wanted that she corresponded with the order, | ||
 Michel Nihoul, Dutroux's apparent link to the upper echelons of the network. Found guilty by the jury, before it was overruled by the presiding judges (31). Nihoul is the ultimate example of an unscrupulous villain, but for some reason he has enjoyed the protection of many magistrates and media outlets. | small hips. He gave me a description of the girl that we were looking for. [One day] I asked him why they [An and Eefje] were still with him even though he claimed he had an order. He told me that the people who had placed the order had come, but that they weren't interested in them... Dutroux explained me that he conditioned the girls to be obedient and submissive when they arrived at customers..." (28) "I would like to reveal other things about Jean-Michel Nihoul, but I don't want that these testimonies are taken up in the dossier. As I said, I fear for my life and those around me. I remind you that Nihoul told me the following: 'if you cross me, I will destroy you'. With those words he made it known to me that he would kill me or have me killed." (29) Although convicted for financial fraud, drug- and human trafficking due to an overwhelming amount of evidence (30), Nihoul ultimately was acquitted from charges that he was involved in the kidnapping and murder of any of Dutroux's girls. However, to anyone who has taken an in depth look into | |
| the case, it's clear that a whole lot of leads had to be ignored and discarded before this conclusion could be reached (32), raising two important questions: How, and why? | ||
Victim-witnesses come forward
Probably the most important (and underreported) thing that happened in the aftermath of the Dutroux affair was that a number of victims from pedophile networks felt that this was their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to testify about what they had experienced. Until Connerotte and Bourlet were able to arrest Dutroux and Nihoul, and retrieve two missing girls, these victim-witnesses did not know who in the Justice Department they could trust. Many of these victims already had tried to speak to the authorities, but investigations never got off the ground. The victims knew the reason: among their abusers were the most powerful men in Belgium: police commissioners, gendarme officers, judges, bankers, businessmen, politicians and high nobility figures.
Not all, but most of these victims who came to Neufchateau to testify about "the network" were designated with an X, followed by a number. Although some of these women later on turned out to have known each other from the network, at the time they decided to testify to Neufchateau none of them had been in contact with each other for many years. Their interviews were conducted separately and they did not have access to each other's testimonies. A short introduction to each victim follows (33).
| X1 | Born in 1969. Abused and neglected by her parents. When 2 years old, sent to her grandmother in Knokke, who owned a hotel-villa that was used as a brothel for high-level pedophiles and sadists. Pedophile videos were also shot here. Introduced to her pimp, Tony Vandenbogaert, at age 4 who began to take her to other locations for sexual abuse and torture. Sent back to her parents in Gent in June 1979 for a variety of reasons. Extremely neglected by her parents for several months until her old pimp showed up again. For years she was taken to abuse- and torture parties. Managed to hook up with a boy she fell in love with, married, and immediately moved out in 1988, which appears to have saved her from ending up in a snuff movie. Never managed to break away completely from the network. Sometimes when her husband left the house for a few days to work as a truck driver, her pimp and some of his associates would show up and take her with them to locations where children were abused. On these occasions she was raped herself or had to participate in abuse against others. X1 was diagnosed with MPD/DID. |
| Nathalie C. (X7) | Born in 1969. Contacted by the BOB after testimonies from X1. First denied knowing anything about X1. It soon turned out that she was heavily traumatized and probably had MPD/DID. After having been brought in for an interview she began to speak about her father, how he sexually abused her, and how he liked to mutilate her sister with cigarettes. She then confirmed that she had been X1's best friend, that she knew about the sexual relationship with Tony and that she had been forbidden to go to the first floor of the hotel-villa of X1's grandmother. The interviews were cancelled by later investigators. X4 identified X7 as a girl who was forced to play in pedophile movies. |
| Chantal S. | Born in 1968. Another woman contacted by the BOB after testimonies from X1. Immediately knew what it was about. Sexually abused by her parents. Her grandmother was into Satanism. Moved with her parents to Knokke at age 6 and was sometimes brought to the hotel-villa of X1's grandmother. Here she also was sexually abused, although she didn't have to endure the extreme torture sessions that X1 regularly underwent. Confirmed that one of the abusers indeed was nicknamed "Monsieur". Had seen X1 being threatened with a revolver by her grandmother. Like X7, she was forbidden to go to the first floor. Chantal's testimonies resulted in a verbal fight between her husband and parents, in which her father admitted to have brought her to X1's grandmother. Tried to commit suicide and was taken up again in a mental institution. X4 identified Chantal also as a girl who was forced to play in pedophile movies. |
| X2 | Police officer who worked on an aspect of the Dutroux investigation. When the X1 case was discussed during a meeting, participants noticed that she seemed very upset. After discussing her history of child abuse with one of her superior officers she decided to become a witness. X2 had ended up as a mistress to a magistrate in Brussels and later to a higher level officer and spokesperson of the Justice Department who was a member of the Rotary. These two men were part of a network in which she was abused from the mid- to late 1980s. X2 was spared from the extreme torture sessions, but heard other girls speak about child murders and was present at a hunting party on children, which is something other Xs have also spoken about. Some of the abusers and locations where this abuse was going on turned out to be the same as mentioned by X1 and other Xs. Withdrew as a witness when she saw that the investigation was being sabotaged, something which didn't surprise her. |
| X3 | X3 had been in the network a long time ago, from 1950 to 1962. From age 3 to 12, she had been severely abused and tortured at home, together with her sister. After that age, her father and his influential group of friends brought her into the network. She described the same elements as other X-witnesses, although the scale of one of the meetings she described is hard to accept without any of the other witnesses backing up the practices at this specific location (some of those involved were in fact mentioned by others). Before contacting Neufchateau, X3 had already written anonymously about her experiences with child abuse and she was well respected for her work with other child abuse victims. It took five interviews before investigators wrote anything down, and even after writing summaries of her testimony it was attempted to leave out the royal family as much as possible - an unwritten rule in Belgium, because the king, in theory, can't be prosecuted. |
| X4 | Born in 1965. Like X1, X4 had been persuaded by a friend to testify. As a young child she was loaned out by her mother to a pimp named Jacques V., who produced SM movies with children. Her story largely paralleled that of X1, although X4 experienced everything from within different sects. She recognized two childhood friends of X1 who had been abused, and named some of the same perpetrators as the other witnesses. X4's parents turned out to live next to a villa where X1 claimed a friend had been abused to such an extend that she died. |
| Nathalie W. | Born in 1965. With support from her therapist she gave her first testimony to the gendarmerie in February 1996, six months before the Dutroux affair. The officer who interviewed her refused to write down an official report. In July 1996, she found two other gendarme officers who were willing to work with her. Nathalie told how she had been raped by her father, a member of the Rotary, since the age of six. Soon thereafter brought into the network and was abused by her father's friends at parties in different villas in the region of Waterloo. When 10 years old, handed by her father to a prince and his main aide, who continued to take her to different abuse parties in Belgium. Confirmed X1's story about the Les Atrebates club, Nihoul and Tony. In turn, X1 recognized Nathalie as a girl from the network and accurately placed her at Les Atrebates. Even though Nathalie confirmed aspects of X1's story, she was easily discredited by her new interrogators, as she not only suffered from extreme psychological trauma (MPD/DID), but also from pathomimie, which is a tendency to inflict physical harm to one's own body in order to play the victim. This last psychological quirk seemed to have surfaced mainly after her original interviewers were replaced by two extremely abusive ones (like would happen with X1). She couldn't handle this pressure and quit testifying in March 1997. Nathalie was severely persecuted for having dared to step forward with her story, maybe even more than X1. |
| VM1 | A gangster who came to Neufchateau in February 1997. Told how he had been brought up in a children's home in Mont-Saint-Guibert. From age 9 to 13, he was regularly picked up from this home by a local juvenile judge who brought him to abuse parties in villas around Brussels. Said that he later worked as a child prostitute in Le Mirano, an elitist club visited by some of the same men that featured in the testimonies of other victim-witnesses above, including Nihoul. Within two days of his supposedly secret testimony, VM1 was stopped on the streets and threatened with death. |
Notice how these victims ended up in the network: instead of having been grabbed from the streets, they were brought in by their own families, or, in one case, taken from a children's home.
At least in western Europe, the idea of a lonely pedophile grabbing children from the street only seems applicable in a relatively small amount of cases (especially permanent abductions). There's a significant amount of evidence that a lot of child abuse happens within networks consisting of degenerate families and their acquaintances (34), which are exploited and protected (really for reasons not fully understood) by people higher up in the food chain (35). Children in the network often are forced to bring in other children (36). The new ones are then controlled through certain psychological routines involving threats, shame and guilt (37).
Although victim-witnesses often report having witnessed many murders in these networks, including children from western Europe, data about child disappearances and deaths is very uncategorized and therefore very inconsistent (38). As for the whole Belgium, estimates range from "at least" 43 disappearances between 1973 and 1996 (39) to as many as 1,022 in one year, with the D.A.'s office in Brussels claiming that approximately 280 children a year go missing in just Brussels alone (40). Also, if victims from these networks or some of the above numbers are correct, the obvious conclusion is that the media is not paying attention to many, if not the majority of child disappearances and deaths, which, in case of the British media, seems to be the true (41).
One interesting aspect many victim-witnesses from different countries have testified about is a very similar psychological approach used to allow the victims of even the most sadistic abuse to function (somewhat) in society, therefore not raising any really alarming questions in the immediate surroundings of the child. We are referring here to the encouraging and maintaining of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) in the victims (42). MPD has these days been renamed to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). It basically is a psychological disorder in which the mind and the memory of the victim is shattered in ten, hundred, or possibly even a thousand different sub-personalities, making testifying extremely difficult and a very long term process. Several X-Dossier witnesses still heavily suffered from this disorder at the time they began to testify.
Questioning the alters
Although a one hundred percent confirmed psychological disorder, MPD/DID remains quite controversial in the public's eye (for those who even heard about it). It's true that DID is a complex disorder and sometimes hard to wrap the mind around (pardon the unintentional pun). But this is largely the result of a lack of information, and if any of the politically correct arguments are stripped away, the real underlying reasons for the controversy become quite simple.
First of all, DID is intrinsically linked to the most extreme sexual and psychological abuse against children. In 97 to 98 percent of the DID cases, victims talk about having been sexually abused since a young age (43). It's not uncommon for DID patients to give details about abuse that sounds so bizarre, horrifying and huge that, no matter what the evidence, will take some time and repeating for the average person to accept as even a possibility. Protected child abuse and -torture networks involving well known individuals would be a primary example of that.
The second reason is that these networks are protected by those involved, who apparently have the power to make sure that very little information on these networks appears in the public domain. Additionally, a rather small, but very influential group of "skeptics", organized around the US-based False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), have been doing a counter-attack since the early 1990s when reports of ritual abuse became a little bit too widespread (44). This group has done everything in its power to convince the public and the psychology community that all DID is created by incompetent psychologists. Because of an incorrect way of asking questions, these psychologists would have inserted certain "false memories" in their patient's minds. Even though more than a dozen board members of the FMSF have been accused of child abuse themselves, have come out in favor of pedophilia, or have a past in mind control research for a whole range of intelligence agencies (45), virtually no mainstream media ever felt the need to consistently point that out. As might be expected, Dutch and Belgian supporters of this FMS Foundation couldn't resist an attempt to discredit X1 with textbook disinformation tactics (46).
But even though FMS Foundation supporters have tried to muddy the waters somewhat, every textbook psychology book makes a clear distinction between DID and schizophrenia. The latter is characterized by delusions, hallucinations and a lack of sense of identity. The different alters of a person suffering from DID, however, all have an identity of their own, and although memory is never 100 percent accurate and there remains the possibility of manipulation, these alters have experienced something traumatic that actually did happen to this person. A brief article on the website of Merck, a large pharmaceutical company, gives one of the best summaries of what Dissociative Identity Disorder actually is:
"Dissociative identity disorder appears to be a rather common mental disorder [other sources say that DID is quite rare]. It can be found in 3 to 4% of people hospitalized for other mental health disorders and in a sizable minority of people in drug abuse treatment facilities. However, some authorities [the FMSF] believe that many cases of this disorder reflect the influence of therapists on suggestible people..."
"Dissociative identity disorder appears to be caused by the interaction of several factors. These include overwhelming stress; an ability to separate one's memories, perceptions, or identity from conscious awareness; abnormal psychologic development, and insufficient protection and nurture during childhood... About 97 to 98% of adults with dissociative identity disorder report having been abused during childhood..."
"... some symptoms may reflect the intrusions of past experiences into the present. For example, sadness may indicate coexisting depression, or it may be that one of the personalities is reliving emotions associated with past misfortunes... People with this disorder are prone to injuring themselves. They may engage in self-mutilation. Many attempt suicide."
"In dissociative identity disorder, some of a person's personalities are aware of important personal information, whereas other personalities are unaware. Some personalities appear to know and interact with one another in an elaborate inner world. For example, personality A may be aware of personality B and know what B does, as if observing B's behavior; personality B may or may not be aware of personality A..."
"Because the personalities often interact with each other, people with dissociative personality disorder report hearing inner conversations and the voices of other personalities commenting on their behavior or addressing them [not to be confused with hallucinations]. They experience distortion of time, with time lapses and amnesia..."
"People with dissociative identity disorder may not be able to recall things they have done or account for changes in their behavior. Often they refer to themselves as "we," "he," or "she." While most people cannot recall much about the first 3 to 5 years of life, people with dissociative identity disorder may have considerable amnesia for the period between the ages of 6 and 11 as well." (47)
X1 suffered from all the symptoms described above, and more. She told how many of her alters still had the same age as when they were created, or how her handwriting differed depending on which alter was active (48). As is obvious from her background of extreme abuse, these symptoms started at an early age. And interestingly, her pimp not only wasn't surprised when he first encountered X1's alters, he actually cultivated them.
"More than ever I discovered that I was missing time. I turned out to have gone to school, get good grades, I even turned out to know several classmates who spoke to me, but somehow this all had gone past me. It seemed as if someone else took over from me as soon as the door of my house closed behind me. It seemed as if the abused Ginie was put away until Tony again stood at my bed or at the school gate. The abused Ginie hardly was aware of school and family life, the other Ginie seemed not present during the abuse, and so lived 'normal'."
"It had always been this way. In Knokke, at grandmother's, the adults had noticed that I talked to the voices in my head, that I often rapidly changed moods, or even began to speak with another voice or accent. Even though I was only 5 or 6, I understood that something like this was weird and that it was not allowed. I learned to hide my voices, my other 'selves'. After what had happened to Clo, the voices, and the bizarre feeling that I at times was led by the inner voices (persons? -sic) got stronger. After the initiation I no longer resisted against the voices. It was blissful to disappear into nothingness, and only to become conscious again if Tony was there. The pain seemed more bearable."
"Tony was the only adult who understood that something was 'wrong' in my head. He didn't get mad about it, but cultivated it. He gave me different names: Pietemuis, Meisje, Hoer, Bo. The names slowly started to become part of me. The strange thing was that if he mentioned a name, the mood that fit that name was immediately called up. Pietemuis [Small Mouse] became the name of the little girl that he brought home after the abuse - a scared and nervous girl that he could comfort by talking to her in a caring and fatherly kind of way. Meisje [Girl] was the name of that part of me that only belonged to him. If he abused me in my bed in the early morning, for example, or if there was no one around us. Hoer [Whore], the name of that part of me that worked for him. Bo, the young woman who cared for him if he was drunk and needed to be looked after."
"'Now you just leave that to me,' he said when I asked him curiously why he gave me so many names, 'daddy Tony knows you better than you know yourself.' That was also true." (49)
Some of X1's other 100+ alters were Kenny, a young alter who had dealt with some of the worst torture; Stone, one of the toughest who answered to Tony and could control her fears; and Moon, born to deal with extreme cold (50).
Even after years of seeing a psychiatrist, X1 still suffered heavily from MPD/DID when she first contacted the Neufchateau investigating cell in September 1996. It took some time before her interviewers, Patriek De Baets and Philippe Hupez, began to understand how to work with her, but in the end, testifying turned out to be the most effective way to reintegrate X1's mind (51). This was a long and extremely challenging process though, and not only for X1. At times the long silences and panic attacks almost drove the interviewers crazy. An example of one of the interview sessions:
"... Meisje [Girl] sits on the window sill, saturated with pain and sadness. She feels the presence of the other victims so well that she can almost touch them with her thoughts. Shivering she crawls against the woodwork of the window and presses herself against it as if she wants to disappear in it... Patriek [De Baets] comes standing next to her, leaning against the window sill.
'Who are the girls you still remember, girl?' he asks, coincidentally pronouncing her name [of the active alter, "Girl"].
'Vero, Mieke, Clo, Noelle, Chrissie...' she says fluently, because she remembered every face, every child.
Patriek was perplexed. After such a difficult hearing, all of a sudden he heard his witness, in a young girl's voice, give a series of names that made him silent.
'Are they still alive?'
Meisje [Girl] lifted her shoulders.
'Some are, I think. Others are not.'...
'Who died?' he asked calmly.
'Chrissie,' I whispered.
Patriek asked how.
'They burned her.'
'Where?'
'In a basement,' she whispered even more quiet. And she withdrew deep within herself, fighting against the odor of the liquid that they had poured over her.
And then when he wanted to ask more, she shook her head.
'I want to go home,' she begged. Away from those horrible memories.
But Chrissie didn't leave her head anymore.
Her screams, her begs for help... Tiu [Regina's murdered child]. Everything came together that week, as if time was something malleable, and became alive again as soon as the images were recalled.
My son, who I had cherished; Chrissie who soon thereafter was gruesomely punished; the screaming in my head. The madness I had felt in the days after. The madness that had started when they... but I refused to let the images come through..."
"Pain? Indeed. It hurt so much that I could only tell via a detour who that day were with Chrissie. It almost drove Patriek and Philippe up the wall. Before them they saw a grown, frightened woman, while they had to communicate with Kenny, the heavily traumatized alter, who had become almost autistic after the death of Tiu and Chrissie. Kenny carried that information with him, but could not speak... stubborn, frightened, evasive, he pushed the questions of the BOB officers away. Only through the support of other alters, who listened along and were located close to him, it was possible for Kenny, stammering and rambling, to tell his story." (52)
A sniff of extreme abuse
DID was created in X1 because of her background of extreme abuse. But what did this abuse actually involve?
First there was the psychological aspect. X1 never received any support or love from her parents, her grandmother, Tony or any of her abusers. Especially Tony and the grandmother, who acted as her pimps, indoctrinated X1 with the belief that she was a nobody, that besides Tony nobody cared about a "little whore" like her, that she was too stupid to become anything else than a prostitute, and that "love" is something you never get for free.
Furthermore, X1 was blamed for just about anything that happened to her, to other children in the network, to her pets, or even to those who abused her. For example, if X1 had given fellatio to her pimp which wasn't satisfying enough, he would beat her up, yelling at her that she was worthless and that it was her fault he was so upset. If X1's abusers found out that she had given out signals of her abuse to the outside world, another girl would be tortured in front of her eyes. During the torture the perpetrators would scream at her that this was all her fault, and would put her face in the other girl's blood. X1 then had to ask forgiveness to the other girl. Even when X1's best fried was raped and murdered in front of her eyes -probably because this girl became too old- she was the one to blame. In most cases X1 was blamed for things she had absolutely no control over. The same thing happened to many other girls in the network. For the abusers it was a way to destroy the victim's self-esteem and confidence, making them perfect sex slaves and objects for sadistic torture (53).
| Besides the psychological indoctrination, X1 and the other victims reported to have undergone a whole range of other traumatic experiences. A session of violent anal sex at | ||
 Regina Louf (X1) described how she and others were sometimes raped by German shepherds or even how snakes were inserted into the vaginas of the girls. It sounds bizarre, but take a look at the pictures above. These have been confiscated from a child abuse network and appeared in the Dutroux dossier, DVD 3, 47073774-1 to 4.pdf. There are hundreds of children on these (low quality) pictures, making you wonder where all of them are today and how they are doing (or if they're alive in the first place). Judging from these pictures (and there are many more), sex with dogs and other animals is very common in child abuse networks. | age 3 certainly would fit in that category, as would being raped by a dog at age 4. But there also were the ice cold showers, the long and painful tie-downs, the many beatings, the rapes with knives and scissors and the torture with razor blades (54). One of X1's many experiences: "Père forced me back on my knees, pushed me with my face on the cool table surface, and the other tied my left- and right wrist to the bed... I was unable to move in any direction and was forced to stay in this humiliating position... Everything is set ready, the lamps are pushed in the right position, the light intensity is measured - what is about to happen, I don't know, but the tension is building in my stomach. What's the deal with those dogs?... I feel how the claws of the rough-haired dog are pressing into my sides. I feel how he's panting in my neck, drool from his tongue is dripping on my back. I scream as I feel how he enters me, how his paws clasp me, his nails press into my skin. 'Get him off me', I scream... My cries are lost in an enthusiastic cheer when the dogs lets something wet run down my legs... It was the first photo shoot with dogs in a long line." (55) Besides having been raped by dogs, X1 also | |
| spoke about how Bernard Weinstein, an associate of Dutroux until murdered by him in 1995, and Annie Bouty, the former girlfriend of Nihoul, sometimes walked around with a snake at abuse sessions, which they used to rape the girls with (56). Sounds hard to believe, doesn't it? However, the pictures above were confiscated from a child abuse network and appeared in the Dutroux dossier (57). Among the hundreds of photos there are quite a few of children being raped by dogs. There also are two or three photos which show young girls with a snake in their vagina. Sex with other animals is not uncommon either. Following is another example which, according to Regina, happened to her in Knokke when she was 10 years old: "When the contractions started her [X1's] grandmother made a phone call. The Lippens brothers, Vanden Boeynants and the assistant [police] commissioner of Knokke arrived. De | ||
| Bonvoisin and Vander Elst arrived thereafter... Vander Elst puts a knife on her throat while Bonvoisin rapes her... She must masturbate while Vander Elst makes a number of photos. Lippens rapes her with a razor blade. When the child exited, de Bonvoisin beat her [multiple times in the face]. Directly after X1 gave birth she was raped and sodomized. Her daughter disappeared six weeks later. She only saw her [daughter] at the factory again." (58) What's there to say about this piece of testimony? The events sound bizarre, but the names and details have been repeated by other independent witnesses. Regina also frequently spoke about the "end circuit", in which many girls tended to end up by the time they reached their 16th birthday. Growing too old, not going along with the abuse, or failing to satisfy a customer; according to Regina, this could all lead to a child prostitute's untimely death. X1, X2, X3, X4, Nathalie W., VM1, Jacques Thoma, Pascal Willems, and others all spoke about children being murdered. These murders were often captured on video, which were subsequently shown at a number of abuse parties. Besides the already powerful statements from witnesses there's also some independent evidence that these so-called snuff films, like child abuse networks, are more than just an "urban myth", as they are usually referred to. Take the Dolo, the notorious night club that played a central role in the X-Dossier and the life of Michel Nihoul, who was one of its most prominent visitors. The Dolo was one of the locations in Belgium where important police commissioners, politicians, lawyers and directors of several well known companies interacted with gang leaders, alleged pedophiles and individuals involved in human trafficking (59). In 1997, Claude "Max" Vankeerberghen, the former valet of the Dolo and driver of Dolores Bara (the co-owner of the Dolo), testified that several Dolo visitors, including a person named Doudou |  More confiscated pictures from a child abuse network. These pictures are included here because images combined with text give a much more powerful message than words alone. Seeing pictures of the actual abuse really lets the reality and the depravity of these networks sink in (and we aren't even dealing with the worst abuse yet). The pictures are censored so it's harder to make silly claims that, for example, these few low quality photos are of any use to aspiring pedophiles. The mainstream Dutch Zembla documentary also included a few pictures of these abuse networks in their documentary, albeit uncensored (a very small child lying underneath a dog, for example). Not sure if that was such a good idea with all those moral crusaders out there. The DVDs, the relevant documents and any backups of these pictures have been deleted, shredded and thrown out way before this article was published. Of the many hundreds, all what's left are these pictures. | |
| and Nihoul, were involved in a pedophilia ring which kidnapped children (60). The official report of Van Vankeerberghen also states: | ||
"Van K. heard Nihoul and Doudou speak about cages for children, to make them suffer. Videos from the USA would show black children in cages in which they were tortured and burned [1992-1993 period]." (61)
The generally accepted origins of the snuff movie go back to the early 1970s, the name having been derived from Charles Manson, who is said to have coined the term snuff for murder, and his "family" (a cult), who committed a number of murders which some claimed were filmed.
Some years after these facts, beginning on October 2, 1975, there was a brief string of newspaper reports that the FBI and several police departments were investigating claims of reporters and informants that a number of 8 mm films, one of them from Argentina, had been smuggled into the country showing pornographic sessions ending in real murders (62). Details were provided for only one film, and they turned out to be very similar to the snuff scene added to the movie 'Snuff', brought out in early 1976 (63). Besides details of the scene, this movie had also been recorded in Argentina. As not a peep was heard anymore from detective Joseph Horman, who had spoken to the media in early October 1975, it is generally assumed the police and FBI were not on the trail of any real snuff movies.
| Even today the existence of snuff movies remains controversial because publicly-available visual evidence of these type of films is not available. Initially, the author of this article was quite intrigued by one of the pictures that appeared in the Dutroux dossier showing a girl impaled on a pole (between all the hundreds of confiscated abuse pictures). But after a bit of research this turned out to be a controversial scene from the 1981 movie 'Cannibal | ||
 An apparently real "snuff" movie. Found it via a regular file sharing network and turned out to be quite popular. All other available "snuff" was mainly regular porn, fake rape or indeed a few cases of real rape of under aged girls. This video is very macabre, is unedited and has awfully realistic feel and look to it, unlike the movies from the horror genre which are usually cited when the "snuff hype" is discussed (I watched them specifically for this article). Can I guarantee it's real? No. One would need to know who the victim is to start with. Who initially uploaded it? Good question. Don't know. At one point it was masked as a French-language Prison Break episode. | Holocaust', one of the movies often cited by skeptics who want to prove that the sole source for rumors about snuff films are bizarre horror movies like these. Other movies cited by skeptics are 'Flowers of Flesh and Blood', 'Nightmares in a Damaged Brain' and the earlier-mentioned 'Snuff'. However, there's a big difference between these horror movies and the video of which screenshots can be seen on the left. In this low quality, unedited home video a person is torturing and raping a girl -allegedly his daughter- who has been tied to a chair. During the half hour that the torture lasts, the perpetrator pierces the victim's nipples, nails her right hand to the chair, pulls loose her fingernails, rapes her with a knife and does a number of other highly unpleasant things to this girl. Officially, it's not a snuff movie, because the victim isn't killed (at least, not | |
| that day. Another session was announced for the next day) and it isn't known if this video was sold or distributed in a network, but one can wonder why this perpetrator, like pedophiles as Jean-Paul Raemaekers and Dutroux, was filming his own abuse. For personal use? Or for the same reasons that Raemaekers and others gave, to distribute it in a network? (64) | ||
In stark contrast to the lacking visual evidence, victim-witnesses not only have been testifying about violent abuse and -trafficking networks for a long time, they also mentioned very specific and similar details, including the torturing and killing of children, sometimes in front of cameras. These reports really got off the ground in the United States in 1987, followed a few years later by Great Britain. Since the Dutroux case exploded, we also know that similar testimonies have come from Belgium and surrounding countries. As we shall see, Russia followed in 2000.
One of the more interesting cases pertaining to snuff movies is a child abuse and -trafficking ring of Brits who were forced to relocate to the Amsterdam region in the 1980s. Over the years, this ring made the news on several occasions.
The first time was in 1990, when a teenage victim-witness, Andrew, contacted welfare workers of the British National Association for Young People In Care (NAYPIC). Andrew claimed to have been a victim of a British pedophile ring and forced on several occasions to film snuff movies in a warehouse in or around Amsterdam. The welfare workers were skeptical, but until further developments the teenager was allowed to live in the home of NAYPIC's London development officer, Mary Moss. Just before Andrew was to give a more official testimony, he was drugged and pulled into a van, right in front of Moss' home. The teenager had already been threatened and followed in the streets before this kidnapping. It's not known if he was never heard of again. The report on Andrew also stated:
"Welfare staff at Naypic have been convinced by Andrew and other runaways that such [snuff] films are being made. They have been told of a paedophile group known as the Elite Twelve, which is prepared to pay up to Pounds 5,000 to youngsters to make videos involving torture and sado-masochism, and which may lead to murder."
"They have also been told of a snuff movie made last year when a 14-year-old boy was beaten by three men in an East End flat, raped and battered to death with clubs."
"Chris Fay, an adult adviser to the association, said: "I am convinced such videos exist. I have been shown one in Amsterdam by a Dutch colleague. It showed three men wearing leather masks cutting up a girl aged about 13 with a flick knife." (65)
In this article, one of the top experts in pedophilia, Ray Wire, is quoted as having seen snuff movies in the United States. On other occasions Wire explained that he watched them while on a fellowship in the United States with the FBI doing his behavioral study on child abusers (66). Apparently, he later stated that the films he had been shown were "sophisticated simulations", but was still sure that the FBI had real ones in their possession (67).
In April 1997, the British-Amsterdam ring again made the news. The first thing reported was that there had already been inconclusive joint UK-Dutch investigations in 1990 and 1993 (68). Also, by 1997, these police services were in the possession of at least three statements from child abusers that this ring had produced a number of snuff movies (69). Unfortunately, the only film specifically mentioned in the press had all the hallmarks of being fake, and indeed this later appears to have been the case (70).
The pedophile ring yet again made the news in June 1997 when it was announced that Warwick Spinks, a violent pedophile who ran a homosexual boys club in Amsterdam (who also claimed he could arrange snuff films), was to be released. Spinks had been convicted only two years before for drugging and sexually assaulting a homeless boy, kidnapping him to Amsterdam and selling him to a homosexual brothel. When his apartment was raided, police found his clients' names, details of their sexual preferences, phone numbers and information about young boys. (71)
The most detailed investigation of the British child abuse colony in Amsterdam was published in November 2000 by the Award-winning journalist Nick Davies. Now even more evidence was provided for the existence of not only a vast boy trafficking network, but also for the existence of a small number of snuff movies. As it's always best to read the original sources, a long excerpt from this article follows:
"A year after Bristol detectives finally started to unravel the ring of paedophiles who had been abusing children there for up to 20 years, they found an informant with an alarming story. The man, whom we will call Terry, had a long history of sexually abusing boys. He did not come from Bristol but, by chance, he had come across some of the paedophiles the detectives were investigating - in Amsterdam, where he said they had become involved with a group of exiled British child abusers who had succeeded in commercialising their sexual obsession. The exiled paedophiles were trafficking boys from other countries; running legitimate gay brothels and selling under-aged boys "under the counter"; they had branched out into the production of child pornography. And they had killed some of them... Terry said he had seen most of the [worst] video himself and had vomited before he could reach the end..."
"Soon, other informants were offering more detail. One man said he had seen Warwick Spinks selling a special video for pounds 4,000. It showed a boy whom he thought was only eight or nine being sexually abused and tortured by two men. But the most startling allegations came from a gay man, "Frank", who had gone to Amsterdam in July 1990 and found himself caught up in this paedophile underworld. In 1993, he spoke to the same officers at Scotland Yard."
"Frank told police that Warwick Spinks had invited him to come on a trip to the Canaries, where he had suggested Frank should help him sell videos and showed him a sample. Frank said he watched in growing horror as the video played out a murder - a boy who seemed to be no older than 12 was beaten and attacked with needles, before being castrated and cut open with a knife..."
"[Scotland Yard and their Dutch counterpart] recruited an undercover officer to pose as a child abuser and befriend Warwick Spinks in England. In a series of meetings, Spinks described how he picked up boys in Dresden, in Bratislava in the Czech Republic, and in Poland, where, he claimed, they cost only 10p. The undercover officer asked Spinks if he could get him a sado-masochistic video featuring boys as young as 10, and Spinks replied that he knew people in Amsterdam who could: "I know, well I knew, some people who were involved in making snuff movies and how they did it was, they only sold them in limited editions, made 10 copies or something, 10 very rich customers in America, who paid Dollars 5,000 each or something like that". Spinks divulged no more about the video and failed to produce a copy of it...Without more evidence, Scotland Yard could not justify the expense of keeping the undercover officer or of sending officers to Amsterdam..."
"In search of their origins, I went to Berlin, to the Bahnhof Am Zoo, where the trains arrive from all over eastern Europe, bringing the destitute in search of a dream. A specialist social worker there, Wolfgang Werner, told me there were some 700 east European boys, aged from 11 to 17, who had ended up in the sex industry in Berlin. But, to his knowledge, many hundreds of others had been taken off on a kind of underground railroad which fanned out to Zurich and Hamburg and Frankfurt, and, most of all, to Rotterdam and Amsterdam..."
"About that time [1992], he and Edelman [Germans] stopped trafficking, not so much because of Goetjes's arrest but because they had been told some of the boys were being used in snuff movies..."
"At first sight, Terry might have been describing the video Frank saw but its details differ: Frank described a video shot in a barn; Terry says his was shot in a flat. Frank described the abuse and murder of one boy; Terry says there was a second boy, who was also being abused and who was alive at the point he turned off the tape. And yet, the overlap is striking: the specific nature of the violence is identical; and Terry names the man who actually committed the killing - he is the same German whose barn was allegedly picked as a porn studio by the child porngraphers. Terry, Frank, Edward and Spinks certainly mixed with the paedophile colony in Amsterdam in 1989/90 and all four separately claim at least one boy was killed on video. Spinks told the undercover officer that a German boy was killed; Frank says Spinks once hinted to him that a German boy named Manny had been murdered; we have confirmed from talking to boys who worked in Spuistraat [there were two clubs, owned by vicious paedophiles Alan Williams and Spinks] at the time that a boy of that name and nationality, then 14, did disappear. Terry, however, says he thinks the victim of the video which he saw was Dutch, named Marco and probably 16..."
"The Bristol detectives can get no further. The Dutch say they will not investigate, and Avon and Somerset police have neither the funds nor the legal power to run their own inquiry in the Netherlands." (72)
Other evidence of snuff movies had surfaced several weeks before the article above was published. In September 2000, the Italian media broke the story of a Russian child abuse network -centered in Murmansk and Moscow- which besides regular child pornography and hardcore SM, also shot snuff movies, selling them for at least 4,000 pounds per video. The children were recruited through familiar tactics: they were lured away from the street or orphanages with empty promises, while a small number was kidnapped. Most clients, among them businessmen and government officials, came from Italy and Germany; others came from France, Britain, America and Japan. Several "large financial companies" were tied to the network, but names weren't given (73). The Observer reported:
"Last week Italian police seized 3,000 of Kuznetsov's videos on their way to clients in Italy, sparking an international hunt for paedophiles who have bought his products. The Italian investigators say the material includes footage of children dying during abuse..."
"The Russian videos, which had been ordered over the internet, were intercepted when they came into Italy by post, repackaged and then delivered by undercover police officers. They cost between Pounds 300 and Pounds 4,000, depending on what type of film was ordered."
"Covert film of young children naked or undressing was known as a 'SNIPE' video. The most appalling category was code-named 'Necros Pedo' in which children were raped and tortured until they died."
"The Naples newspaper Il Mattino published a transcript of an alleged email exchange between a prospective client and the Russian vendors. 'Promise me you're not ripping me off,' says the Italian. 'Relax, I can assure you this one really dies,' the Russian responds. 'The last time I paid and I didn't get what I wanted.' 'What do you want?' 'To see them die.'" (74)
A Swedish newspaper added:
| "The pictures are unbearable for normal people to watch. Here are prolonged rape sequences with children begging to be spared. They are abused until they faint. Then they are murdered in front of the cameras... Yes, there are even scenes of actual autopsies on young people... In the 'product catalog' of the pedophiles were pictures of a 10 year old girl who had been killed by | ||
 Andrei Minaev, one of the three main suspects of having ran the Russian ring. By the time the affair hit the news, his two partners had already been released from prison due to a recently-launched amnesty program for inmates. The picture is an excerpt of one of the confiscated videos. | hanging. A five year old girl with a grimace of pain as she is raped. An adult is killed by gradual crushing." (75) Even though this news is hugely important, there have been only a handful of newspaper reports about this whole affair. In Italy, some of the most passionate reporters were quickly done away with after they had shown a number of abuse images in a late night television program (76). In contrast to the US media, which appears to have been completely silent on the subject (77), several British newspapers briefly wrote about the affair. But even in Italy the whole matter vanished from the public eye within one or two weeks with no follow up reports having been published since. So as usual, those who want answers are left with numerous questions: Have | |
| the hundreds of suspects against whom evidence was found been prosecuted? What happened to the thousands of others who were still under investigation? Was this network tied to other networks? What happened to the videos? Can snuff movies still be considered a myth? | ||
As for Belgium, besides witnesses in the Dutroux affair, there have been others who claimed that child abuse and snuff networks are a reality.
In July 1998, Marcel Vervloesem and his Morkhoven Workgroup (Werkgroep Morkhoven), a private anti-child pornography group, made international headlines after having obtained thousands of pictures from an internet-based, sadistic, child pornography network, ran from an apartment in Zandvoort (a town near Amsterdam) (78). They also acquired a list of clients and associates of this network, which turned out to include the earlier-mentioned Warwick Spinks (79). Because the children who appeared in these pictures came from all over the world, international police agencies were very interested and managed to identify several dozen victims. It was mainly the Dutch and Belgian authorities who failed to do their job, and when one reads that there are links to the British- Amsterdam paedophile ring (80), a person who probably procured children for high level officials (81), an anonymous "contact" of the Dutch royal family (82), and one of the girls named by X1 (83), things suddenly begin to make sense again.
Another overlooked fact is the Morkhoven Workgroup's claim that they were in the possession of a snuff film, which they showed to Hubert Brouns, a member of parliament and a mayor of a Belgian county; and Nelly Maes, a former member of Belgian parliament, European Parliament, a senator, and today chairman of the European Free Alliance party. Jan Boeykens, chairman of the Morkhoven Workgroup:
"Several years ago, I saw with Hubert Brouns and Nelly Maes a videotape at Marcel Vervloesem's on which it could be seen how a criminal dressed as a physician raped a constantly crying 4 year old girl in the 'doctor's cabinet' while a 12 year old girl, a so-called nurse, brought in the necessary instruments on a platter." (84)
Brouns and Maes, together with Marc Verwilghen, the chairman of the Dutroux commission, had reminded the Belgian Minister of Justice in November 1997 about some of the work the Morkhoven group had done, but their recommendations were disregarded.
| Researchers of the Morkhoven Workgroup have been relentlessly persecuted and intimidated ever since they first began their investigations in 1989. Vervloesem has been the main target of both the justice department and the media, but he still fared better than one of his colleagues. On November 15, 1998, one of the (part-time) Morkhoven Workgroup | ||
| investigators, Gina Pardaens-Bernaer, died when she drove into a bridge pillar. Few in her surroundings believed this to be an accident. Pardaens had spoken to a number of friends about a video of a sex party in which a little girl was abused and murdered. She thought to have recognized one the participants in that video as a close associate of Michel Nihoul. It was also said that she had gotten her hands on evidence of a Belgian-French-Swiss child abuse network, and had sent what she had to a very interested Swiss police. In the weeks and days before her death, Pardaens had been warned off her investigation on many occasions: she had received numerous death threats; her son had been run off his bike by a car; emails and phone calls had been intercepted; strangers followed her on the streets and in cars; during a train ride she had been stopped by men who told her to cease her inquiries; at times her phone calls, fax machine and internet were jammed; and she had been interrogated and intimidated over one of the children she had been trying to find. (85) It has not been unusual for people who could testify against Nihoul's innocence, or provide evidence of a larger network around Dutroux in general, to be intimidated or killed. There have been at least 20 to 25 suspicious deaths tied to the Dutroux case (86), with just as many reports of intimidation. At some point the deaths became so obvious that Jean Denis Lejeune, the father of one of the girls kidnapped by Dutroux, remarked: "As if by coincidence people die. There is no explanation for their deaths. For instance, they are victims of a |  October 2006, Marcel Vervloesem with Tiny Mast, the mother of murdered Kim and Ken Hehrman. Mast has also become a good friend of X1. Mast: "Those guys [inspectors she had to deal with] are so aggressive and so inhumane that I sometimes feel that they are part of the same clique as those who took away my children." Marcel, who came from a broken family, grew up in children's homes with 6 of his brothers and sisters. After he and his team had broken the Zandvoort case (and others) his half brother stepped into the limelight to accuse him of the exact same acts he was trying to prevent. Around his half brother a small group of other men came out to accuse Marcel (all came from his half brother's bar). This case has been going on for years, and while the media clearly supports the accusers, a judge recently demanded that the group around Marcel's half brother all be subjugated to lie detector tests, not the least because they (also) have been accused on multiple occasions of pedophilia and other criminal acts. Next to the abusers, the only ones benefitting from this debacle are the magistrates who had to follow up on the cases exposed by the Morkhoven group. That's not to say Marcel is a saint, but there's little doubt that he and his group are continually undermined by those who want to keep the existence of large scale child abuse networks secret. | |
| deadly traffic accident just when they are under way to testify. Or one finds their charred bodies. Our judiciary apparently doesn't have sleepless nights over this." (87) | ||
But besides members of the Morkhoven Workgroup there was another researcher who already in the early 1990s gave detailed information about Belgian child abuse networks and the reality of snuff movies. His name is Belgian Jean-Pierre Van Rossem, and apparently, just before bailing out, he had even arranged to play in one.
No doubt, van Rossem is one of the most eccentric and controversial persons of Belgium. However, even though he looks like a doped-up cult leader, he certainly isn't. In the 1970s, Van Rossem developed a piece of software called Moneytron which apparently could quite accurately predict trends in the money market. With an average return on investments of 18 to 25% in the 1980s and early 1990s, van Rossem gained a fortune of several hundred million dollars and attracted businessman from all over the world. At some point, he also counted the Belgian royal family among his clients. In 1991, van Rossem was sentenced to 5 years in jail on charges of massive financial fraud (released after about a third of the sentence, which is normal in Belgium). It would probably have been a lot longer if his clients would have testified against him. However, a lot the money van Rossem was handed appears to have been dirty.
Just before being convicted, van Rossem had become active in Libertarian politics and had won three seats in parliament. Around the time he went to jail he had begun to write books. One of these books was 'Hoe kom ik van de ground?' ['How do I get off the ground?'], published in 1993, in which he described his experiences with escort-services, brothels, SM clubs and other aspects of sex culture.
Even though he was enormously wealthy and knew everything about finance, van Rossem was mostly shunned by the Belgian aristocracy. Besides his unusual look and simple background, his anarchist tendencies appear to have been the main cause of that. Van Rossem has made numerous peppered statements, not only against the Belgian royal family and Islam, but more recently also about the West's financial clique keeping the third world poor, 9/11 and bird flu (88).
For his book 'Hoe kom ik van de ground?' van Rossem gathered a small group of people who went to all kinds of different sex clubs to give them a rating. Although this is already quite an unusual thing to do, especially for a reasonably prominent person, that wasn't even close to enough for van Rossem. Van Rossem also tried to unearth evidence of child abuse and snuff networks and it appears that he succeeded in that. His narrative of the whole adventure reads like a somewhat more hardcore version of the 1999 movie 8 mm with Nicolas Cage.
| At some point, Van Rossem took with him a well known customer of many different sex shops in Belgium and just across the border in the Netherlands. In all these shops he asked the owner for "more exclusive" material, obviously implying illegal, under the counter magazines, pictures and videos. None of the sex shops in Antwerp and Brussels could or would help him with this request. However, in a few stores in Hulst and Putte (two small towns about 60 km or 40 miles apart, the former just across the border in the Netherlands, and the latter in Belgium. | ||
| Antwerp is right in between them) he was able to get pedophile magazines, pictures and videos. One of the things that Van Rossem learned was that paedophiles were active at the Dutch- Belgian border who kidnapped children, often for brief periods, to abuse them in front of the camera. Apparently, the Dutch and Belgian police in these areas have numerous dossiers on this kind of abuse, but in the rare cases that a perpetrator is caught, they are usually unable to prove that the abuser is in contact with a network. As numbers on missing and killed children are too unorganized to be very useful, this might very well be true. (89) After buying some of the pedophile goods, which included a painful rape of a small child, van Rossem went back to one of the sex shops and asked for even more hardcore material for which he was willing to pay a hefty price. He hinted that he would like to see a girl being murdered on camera. Within a week, van Rossem received what he had ordered for 5,000 euros, a price quite similar to later reports. "The tape showed how the girl was brought into an empty room by a man with a hood over his head. She was handcuffed... The man cut the clothes from her body with a knife. She had scratches and bruises all over her body. He hit her in the face with his hand. After that she was thrown to the ground by the same man and anally raped. When he was done with this, he threw the girl against a wall and began to beat and kick her over her whole body. When she slid to the ground, he went to stand with one foot on all her limbs and broke with both hands her arms and legs. Then for some time he slowly worked on her with a knife, and stabbed her 32 times in total, mainly in the chest and abdomen. Finally, he cut her throat, again slowly. After that, he slowly labored on the girls' body, from the feet to her head, with great attention to the bloody details. It was perfectly clear that the girl was already dead by then. The whole movie had lasted 57 minutes and had not been edited." (90) Having been supplied with this video still was not enough for van Rossem. While receiving the video from the sex store owner, he had inquired if he could be present when such a snuff movie was shot. The sex store owner had called to his anonymous supplier with this request and informed van Rossem that something might be arranged. But first he had to give his personal information. Two days after having watched the video, van Rossem was called by a representative of the organization that made these snuff movies, and was invited to a cafe in Breda (Netherlands) that same evening. When van Rossem arrived, a well-dressed man of about 30 years old approached him. This person informed van Rossem that he was to take him to a person "who could help him". Van Rossem was brought to another cafe where a slightly younger, but equally well-dressed man was waiting. This person informed him that they had looked at his personal and financial information and that this was satisfying. In |  Van Rossem: part time computer expert, financial expert, politician and white collar criminal, but full time anarchist. He referred to "snuff" as "sniff", a term not often used. According to van Rossem, this term has been derived from "sniffing up the real atmosphere of illegal sex" (p. 125 of his book). Apparently, Texan millionaires, Japanese businessmen on a stopover in the United States and Arab sheikhs have become the most important customers of pedophile snuff movies (p. 125-126), which solely refers to movies in which a person is murdered for the exact purpose of filming the event for distribution. One thing we know for sure is that some of the (often Western intelligence-connected) overly religious Middle-Eastern princes and sheikhs have rather interesting sexual preferences. April 23, 2003, The Scotsman, 'Britons held over 'Royal sex ring'': "According to the popular weekly news magazine VSD, the Saudi prince, who has not been named, paid 1.9 million for three months of attention. Some 40 members of the call girl ring from Poland, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, the United States, Venezuela and Brazil allegedly travelled to Dubai at the end of January and were installed in a royal palace. The group included several models as well as male prostitutes and transvestites. Members of the ring were paid 27,600 each, the magazine said, as well as receiving presents including watches and jewellery from the Saudi royal... The prostitutes said they were under constant surveillance and were forbidden from making telephone calls." This is by no means the only accusation. The Fortunato Israel prostitution ring also had Arab diplomats and businessmen among its clients, just as men from the notorious Adnan Khashoggi. Although covered up by an alleged child abuser, this ring was also tied to child abuse and murder through Maud Sarr and especially Israel's mistress, Roger Boas (in whose factory allegedly a snuff room was located). Kay Griggs, wife of Col George Griggs, also mentioned some of the Saudi princes in relation to child abuse, sexual perversion and blackmail. X2's testimony raised the question if van Rossem's research hasn't been too in depth for his own good. | |
| two or three short conversations over the next two days a deal was made in which van Rossem would be taken to an undisclosed location where he could rape and kill a girl any way he liked. It would cost him 75,000 euros; 45,000 if he only wanted to watch. | ||
Of course, van Rossem backed off at the last moment, leaving the organizers of the event with the impression that he was afraid to get robbed by them. Van Rossem went to one of his other apartments at the sea for the few months to lay low, but before doing that, he had deposited all his evidence and additional information in the mailbox of the Court of Cassation in Breda. Van Rossem waited and waited in the following weeks, expecting to be contacted or at least reading something in the paper about a follow up investigation. Nothing happened and nothing was reported.
The sex shop remained in existence and after some time van Rossem sent one of his contacts to inquire yet again for "special material". It turned out that there was a new owner who couldn't arrange any of this. After the contact explained that it had been possible in the past to get this "special material" at this location, the new owner explained that this is what had gotten the previous owner into trouble. So apparently something happened, but it never made the newspapers.
It is clear that van Rossem did as in depth research on the topic as possible, as he himself continually visited the red light districts of every major city he went to. He loved visiting prostitutes. Not withstanding that he did an excellent job with his book, in late 1996, X2 raised some question about how in depth van Rossem's research exactly has been. PV 117.535, November 19, 1996, summary of X2 testimony:
"Parties with under aged children in Eindhoven [large Dutch city near the Belgian border] with Delvoie. 18th century Castle. Departure in convoy from Knokke. The cars with German license plates followed with the little girls. Reception at the castle = a woman = price of 2,000 Belgian franks per person [about 50 euros]. It is necessary to come with another person. It is necessary to take off clothes. A bikini might be accepted. Swimming pool - sauna - solar bench - cold buffet. [There are] rooms without doors to [different] themes. Room with mirrors and cameras. Room with several mattresses. Room with obstetric tables - handcuffs - chains. Karel and X2 [went] 30-50 times to this castle [seemingly an average of about once a month]. Same little girls as those in Cromwell. Clients of the castle: Patrick Denis... Jean-Pierre van Rossem... Baron de Bonvoisin... Jean-Paul Dumont... friend of Patrick Denis = Carine... Another Carine and Patricia who work in the Palace of Justice in Bruxelles... Benoit Hubert... Claude Leroy... [Paul] Bourlee (attorney in Nivelles)... The little girls disappeared when they were about 15-16 years. For the orgies [were used]: little girls of 12-13 years. In the summer of '88, one of the oldest [Eva] (15-16 years) was taken into the sadomasochist room - she was never seen again. The little girls drank alcohol and came out of these parties [completely] numb."
At least in the summary, it is not specified who of the guests did and didn't abuse the under aged girls. It's possible that this was just one of van Rossem's many paid-sex explorations and it is obvious that a one time visit would be enough for anyone to remember him. But still, this testimony does raise some questions.
However, many events in van Rossem's life, which is characterized by bizarre situations and controversial statements, raise questions. In some cases, his statements reflect a huge egotism, but he often appears to be giving the simple truth, something which is not appreciated by everyone. An example relating to the global trafficking of children and women (many other quotes have been taken up in his biography in 'the accused' appendix):
"The Philippines are the target of boy-loving pedophiles, who can get here anything they want. Nine or ten year old boys are loudly offered by hotel managers or by pimps on the streets. Rio has also become a pedophile paradise where boys and girls are offered freely. In Bangkok the lovers of hard sex and extreme SM or similar rushes can find what they are looking for... In clubs there is a floor show in which sex with dogs, snakes, goats or even donkeys, ponies and horses is very normal, and where girls are delivered to hotel rooms on an "everything is allowed" basis... Violent sex, in which the girls or boys are hurt, mutilated or killed, is very normal here. The eastern European countries formerly belonging to the USSR: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria have become sex paradises in a very short period... In a timeframe of several years Budapest has become an immense red light area, with hundreds of bars, cabarets and brothels, and has it become the largest rotating platter of trade in woman in Europe. In the streets of Moscow or St. Petersburg thousands of heroin and vodka addicted girls offer their services... Also with us the bars, cabarets and brothels are filled with eastern European girls." (91)
Even though the public still thinks that sadistic child abuse is mainly a crime committed by a few unorganized psychopaths as Dutroux or Fourniret, in professional investigating circles it is widely acknowledged that large, organized, sadistic child abuse networks exist right here in the West. Going through British newspaper archives provides one with numerous reports of pedophiles trading pictures and videos amongst one other, sometimes on a very large scale. Senior executives of Scotland Yard, Europol or Interpol (Bjorn Eriksson) have accepted the existence of large paedophile networks a long time ago (92).
Girls X1 had witnessed being murdered
X1 claimed to have witnessed the torture and murder of dozens of children, mainly in the period 1976-1988. She gave the first names of about 35 of these children and claimed to have forgotten the names of another 30 or so (93). Inspectors picked out some of the more interesting names and descriptions given by X1 in an effort to establish her credibility. As a result the investigations into four deceased girls were reopened: Veronique Dubrulle, Christine Van Hees, Carine Dellaert and Katrien de Cuyper. Even though X1's information about these girls turned out to be amazingly accurate, or, in other cases, led to whole lists of interesting coincidences, every single investigation was ultimately shut down.
The life and death of these girls has been described in great detail in the 1999 book the X-Dossiers and the 2004 Zembla documentary. Only occasionally a footnote will be used. As far as possible, every claim has been checked via the PVs.
Veronique Dubrulle, from Gent:
After correctly pointing out a picture of Veronique Dubrulle, X1 accurately stated that this girl had died in or around 1983. According to X1, Veronique had been tortured to death with a knife at an abuse party where Michel Nihoul, Annie Bouty, her pimp Tony, Emile Dellaert (father of another murdered girl in the network), a member of the Bert family and several others had been present (94). Veronique's father, Jacques, turned out to be an administrator of the cinema company Decatron NV, which was owned by the Bert family, and went on to become the long time chairman and patron of the International Film Festival of Flanders, located in Gent.
Patriek De Baets and his team looked up the death certificate of Veronique and it turned out that she had officially died from a chronic disease, apparently cancer. In any case, because of the nature of the disease, the inspectors couldn't figure out why a neuropathist and a neurosurgeon had signed her death certificate. They went back to X1 and asked if she knew any of these men. According to X1, these two doctors -one of them internationally esteemed at this moment- had been present at abuse parties organized by the Hanet family of UCO Textiles, also headquartered in Gent. She had been raped by one of them, the other was more interested in 7 to 8 year old girls (95).
The investigation into the death of Veronique was shut down in early 1997. One of the main arguments was that De Baets and his team should have waited with questioning X1 about the two doctors after she had been able to identify them from pictures (couldn't this be done afterwards, some would ask). The investigators were never given permission to exhume the body of Veronique.
Interestingly, around the time the investigation into Veronique's death was closed, the existence of the X-Dossiers was mentioned in the press for the first time. Inspectors who had been put on the Dubrulle case found out that Tony, X1's former pimp, phoned up Jacques Dubrulle three times right after these publications. Later research by the authors of the 1999 book 'The X-Dossiers' indicated that both men were good friends. The parents of Veronique, who were quite prominent at the time, have never tried to defend themselves against the accusations made by X1, which were reported in the press.
According to X1, the two Gent doctors were not part of her pimp's immediate circle and they were not involved in the child hunts.
Carine Dellaert, from Gent:
X1 had spoken about a girl named "Clo" since her first interview on September 20, 1996. According to X1, Clo had been 3 years older than herself and was murdered somewhere "between June and December 1983" (96). According to X1, at one point in 1983 she had been picked up from school by Tony and taken to a house in the region of Gent. She found her friend Clo there, lying on a bed. Clo was trying to deliver a baby, but in the process was continually raped and tortured. As a result, she had lost a lot of blood and ultimately died. The baby was taken away.
One of the few things X1 was able to remember about the life of Clo, was the street where her school was located. Armed with this information, the investigators were able to present X1 with 1981-1982 class photos on which she recognized Carine Dellaert as being her Clo. X1 also pointed to a certain "V.", about which she stated: "they killed her too". The investigators checked X1's information and it turned out that Carine Dellaert had disappeared on August 30, 1982, only to be found very badly decomposed in an abandoned cesspit on September 24, 1985. She indeed was 3 years older than X1. The other girl X1 identified by name also had died in 1983 (97).
During the investigation into the death of Carine Dellaert, X1 recalled that her Carine "Clo" Dellaert had worn "an ankle bracelet... a chainlet". And indeed, the 1985 autopsy report on Carine Dellaert mentioned that this girl had worn an ankle chainlet. That same report also mentioned that the remains of a laminaria tent were found at the height of Carine's pelvis. The only purpose of laminaria tents is to slowly open up the cervix to make it easier and more comfortable to give childbirth, again supporting X1's testimony that Carine was trying to deliver a baby in her final hours (98). Additionally, soon after her daughter's disappearance Carine's mother had found out that her daughter was in the possession of maternity clothing (99).
| In early 1997, the BOB in Gent, headed by prosecutor of the king Jean Soenen, took over the investigation of the X1-Dellaert link. They ceased all cooperation with Neufchateau and began a campaign of manipulation and intimation, which ultimately led to the following | ||
 Carine "Clo" Dellaert, introduced to the network by her father, according to X1 and Carine's closest school friend. 1999, 'The X-Dossiers', p. 170: "A former neighbor testified that he had often heard Carine Dellaert shouting for help when she was alone at home with her father." | conclusion by Soenen (read out in very bad Dutch on national tv): "... the testimonies of Regina Louf, alias X1, have been closed definitively. As an overall conclusion it can be stated that all her testimonies have been totally unbelievable and the [inaudible] of pure fantasy. Her testimonies pertaining to the death of Carine Dellaert are completely wrong. During the investigation it clearly turned out that the girl Clo, if this person even existed, absolutely does not identify herself with Carine Dellaert." (100) As usual, there's a total lack of respect for the victim and numerous statements had to be ignored and taken out of context before this conclusion could be reached. Besides some of the things that have already been mentioned, one example is the fact that the BOB in Gent claimed that X1's description of the villa in which the murder allegedly took place was inaccurate. The team of De Baets concluded otherwise, the authors of the the book 'The X-Dossiers' concluded otherwise, and finally a court of law also concluded otherwise (101). Unfortunately, the case was already dead and buried by that time. Another important detail about the house designated by X1 that was | |
| never investigated by the Gent BOB was that it used to be a brothel, the International Club, where many upper class people came. Coincidentally, the parents of X4 lived next door (102). A person named Gustaaf Derdijn had rented the villa since 1991 from the same people who owned the house in the early 1980s. During this time in the early 1980s, Derdijn had been the owner of the Co-Cli-Co, a night club where X1 claimed to have abused by customers of her pimp, Tony, together with Clo/Carine. Investigators found that the Co-Cli-Co was mentioned in Tony's diary. They also found out that when this night club went bankrupt in 1984, one of its largest creditors was Le Cinema Publicitaire, a videostore owned by Tony. The largest creditor was the firm All-Meat, in which not only Derdijn was a partner, but also the Dutch porn king Gerard Cok (103). Cok had been in a partnership with "Fat" Charles Geerts since 1981-1982. Geerts is one of the largest porn kings in the world and even more so than Cok, is intimately tied to the Dutch (and international) mafia. Interestingly, Geerts has been accused on several occasions of trade in pedophile movies (104). | ||
Other examples of evidence ignored by the Gent BOB are the testimonies of Kristelle M. and Fanny V. (a pseudonym). Fanny was Carine's best friend at school. She remembered how Carine would often speak to her about sexual abuse by her father and his friends, and how Carine had often thought about running away from home (105). Kristelle M. was a classmate of X1 who was among those who confirmed X1's relationship with Tony, a person who often waited for her after school. X1 apparently told Kristelle at some point that she was pregnant from this man. Also, according to Kristelle, X1 often went out with a girl named "Christine, Carine, Caroline or Claudine" (106). In 1998, in the aftermath of the X1-Dellaert affair, some old classmates of X1 apparently confirmed that Carine had indeed been known as "Clo" by some (107). This would be a direct contradiction to the claims made by the BOB in Gent.
One of the main reasons cited by prosecutor Jean Soenen for his decision to close the case of X1-Dellaert was that she refused to cooperate when confronted with Carine's father, Emile. Unfortunately, Soenen and the press generally forgot to mention the circumstances of this confrontation. First of all, X1 had been confronted with Tony the day before, and even though he confirmed vast portions of her story, she had been completely drained by yet another intimidating confrontation in which all kinds of manipulations took place. Secondly, like Fanny V., X1 had already testified from day one that Carine's father had been the one responsible for bringing her into the sadist abuse network. It apparently also didn't bother the Gent investigators that Emile had already been investigated for accusations of incest in 1977, next to suspicions against him that he had an affair with an under aged girl in the Netherlands in 1965. Because of accusations of incest from his wife and because he waited a week before reporting his daughter missing, Emile became a suspect in the disappearance of his own daughter. During the investigation the police found out that Emile shot "sensual" photos of his daughter, that witnesses at Carine's scouting club thought that father and daughter were acting more like a couple in love, that Carine had become extremely afraid of the woods all of a sudden, and that she was often heard screaming in the weeks before her disappearance (108). It all didn't matter. Emile would be released, acquitted and later supported by most newspapers after the X1-Dellaert case had broken out.
Christine Van Hees, from the Brussels region:
The 16 year old Christine Van Hees was found tortured to death on February 13, 1984, after an emergency fire response to an old champignon factory. The murder had been surrounded by mystery from day one, and those that largely contributed to that (directly or indirectly) included Jean-Claude Van Espen (business associate and family of Nihoul; would play a crucial role in the X-witness investigation, supporting the fraudulent re-read conclusions), Guy Collignon (chief investigator of the Van Hees murder; apparently acknowledged a cover-up to Christine's brother), Baudouin Dernicourt (later one of the main X-witness re-readers), Didier de Quevy (lawyer of Alexis Alewaeters and soon Marc Dutroux) and Jean-Paul Dumont (CEPIC lawyer; accused by different sources of being part of the Nihoul abuse network). A group of punks was implicated, but no evidence could be found, only false leads.
| Over a decade later, on October 25, 1996, X1 mentioned a number of girls that she had witnessed being murdered. Among these names was a "Christine". Because of the details | ||
| X1 provided, De Baets and Hupez began to think about "le crime de la champignonniere". According to X1, Christine had met with Nihoul in October 1983 and somehow began a relationship with him. After a while, Christine began to figure out that Nihoul was a pretty bad guy, but was afraid to speak about him to her parents. She feared that Nihoul and his friends might hurt her, or possibly her parents. Also, Nihoul had persuaded Christine |  Christine Van Hees. | |
| to have sex with X1 and participate in orgies. She was afraid that her parents wouldn't understand. | ||
Against all protocols of the network, X1 encouraged Christine to try and speak with her parents. X1 briefly mentioned her advice to Christine to Mieke -another girl from the network- who unfortunately became so afraid of reprisals that she informed Nihoul and Tony about X1's dissent. As a result of that, X1 and Christine were taken to the abandoned champignon factory where Christine was murdered.
Whole documentaries can be made about just the X1-Christine Van Hees aspect of the X-Dossiers. To keep things relatively short, below is a quick summary of facts which indicate that X1 spoke the truth about Christine Van Hees and her murder. These facts have mainly been discussed in De Morgen newspaper, the 1999 book 'The X-Dossiers' and the 2003 Zembla X-Dossiers documentaries.
- X1 had stated that Dutroux, who she described as a bit of an outsider, was present at the murder of Christine. Research showed that in the early 1980s Marc Dutroux and Bernard Weinstein visited the same skating rink as Christine Van Hees. According to Michele Martin, Dutroux went there alone since 1983 to make it easier for him to "seduce girls". Just before her death, it is known that Christine had a date with a "Marc" who could well have been Marc Dutroux. However, no conclusive research has been carried out. Additionally, Nathalie Geirnaert, a friend of Christine who lived in the same street as her, recognized Marc Dutroux on two old pictures from the early 1980s as someone who she had seen in the company of Christine. Nathalie explained that in the days before her kidnapping, Christine had become extremely scared of someone or something. When she would leave Nathalie's house, Christine would ask Nathalie to accompany her to her house or ask her to stay at the door until she was inside. The night before the murder Nathalie noticed a suspicious black car in front of Christine's house from 23:30 to 13:00. A man had been sitting behind the wheel the whole time. Nothing was done with Nathalie's testimony.
- According to X1, Christine had met Nihoul in October 1983 and had begun a relationship with him. Friends of Christine later testified that she had begun to act different for the first time in October 1983. Also, Christine often went to the swimming bath of Etterbeek. One floor above this swimming bath the radio show of Michel Nihoul was located. Nihoul had already been very active in Etterbeek through the Dolo. Coincidentally, during the investigation into Christine's murder an anonymous tip came in that the Dolo in Etterbeek was the key to solving the Christine Van Hees murder. No investigation was carried out. In fact, somehow the investigators, headed by Van Espen, managed to write down that the tip was about cafe Chez Dolores instead of the Dolo.
- In late 1984, Fabienne Kirby, a friend of Christine Van Hees in her final months, gave a testimony that would not be incompatible with the one of X1 12 years later. According to Fabienne, Christine had told her how she had ended up in a dangerous group of people involved in sex orgies and apparently sadism. PV 7112, February 20, 1984, Fabienne Kirby (anonymous at the time) to the judicial police: "We got to know each other in October 1983. Over time our discussions became more and more intimate. Christine told such unbelievable stories that I slowly became convinced that she made things up. She told me that she had gotten to know a group of people. She regularly saw them at an abandoned house close to her house. She regularly saw these people in the months October and November 1983. These people were older than Christine. She explained to me that meetings were held in that house, to which a road led about nobody knew. Other girls were in the group. Sometimes, she said, she went alone to the house to write her diary. Christine never spoke about this with girls from her school class. I was bewildered when she told me what happened there. She told me that if she ever spoke about this with her parents or brothers, her so-called friends would kill her and burn down the house. She told that in the group free love is practiced... She told me that this group attracted and frightened her at the same time. In early 1984, I noticed that Christine had changed a lot. She had lost weight, was paler and in any case took less care of herself. She said she wanted to blow up all bridges because very bad things had happened. I noticed that she had bruises, and a cigarette burn on her arm. She then explained that it had started as a game, that those games had started slowly, but then became violent. Christine had come into conflict with one of the other girls in the other group. She felt very much attracted to a member of the gang. She told me that it was possible to feel sexually attracted to a man, without really loving him. She truanted from school. About her friends she said: 'They are pigs, but I feel good with them.' She said me that, once you ended up in that milieu, you never got out. It was of little use, she said, to talk about it with someone, because no one would believe her.'" Kirby explained that she had undergone an abortion during the time that she knew Christine. The father would have been a member of the Derochette family and a full cousin of the now well known pedophile Patrick Derochette. A law clerk of examining magistrate Jean-Claude Van Espen, who headed the investigation into Christine Van Hees, married into the Derochette family and was tied to the kidnapping and murder of Loubna Benaissa. It is known that a woman named Nathalie Perignon phoned up Fabienne during the Dutroux and X-witness investigation. Coincidentally, Perignon had been present with three men in a black car observing the champignon factory where Christine had been murdered the week before. All four individuals in the car worked at Nihoul's Radio Activite and personally knew Nihoul.
- X1 was blindfolded and bare-footed when she, Christine and the abusers stepped out of the car. Before entering the compound she felt a lot of gravel under her feet. It is correct that in 1984 there was gravel all over the place.
- The compound she was brought into smelled moldy, like it hadn't been used for a long time. This seems likely, as the champignon factory had been abandoned since 1972.
- X1's overall description of the champignon factory where Christine was murdered is accurate. The former owner and his son could step by step find themselves in the description given by X1; from stepping out of the car to the location where Christine had been murdered. The son of the former owner of the champignon factory to Zembla (Dutch TV), 'De X-dossiers - Part I' (March 11, 2003): "The doors. We had very special, hand-made doors. Old doors with ornaments, which she described perfectly. She knew all that. She drew the chimney and the living room. It matched quite well. The chimney looked like it. She drew the rose window. A rose window is a rose window. It could well be our rose window. What she told about the champignoniere was accurate. I showed the description [of X1] to one of my brothers. That girl had to have been there. There's no other way." 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulte and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-Dossiers', p. 244-245: "The son is responsible for a stir when the texts [descriptions of the champignoniere of X1 and an inspector at the scene. They differ] are presented to him. 'That police officer has not been inside there, your witness X1 was'... The police officer in question, Jacques Dekock, is summoned that evening and immediately confronted with the son. The confrontation doesn't last long. It's true, he admits. He was so dismayed by the body that evening that he hardly looked at the rest of the building. The complex was demolished in 1989. Nowhere information is available about how the building looked in 1984. It was such a complex clew of houses, hangers, driveways, halls and basements that all who would try to do a little guessing on describing the place would be seen through immediately. And that is what is so bizarre. The inspectors just couldn't figure it out how X1 told them that she got there by car, stepped out, stumbled... The son of the owner had no problems with this. Almost immediately he could tell exactly through where X1 entered the building and how she reached the basement. That she stumbled in the hall is logical, he says. More people used to do that. By rebuilding two houses into one, a connection had been created with two stairs: the first one going down, then up again. 'In reality she was in the kitchen', the son deducts from the description of the wallpaper and the tiles - which also is perfectly accurate. He went through it with his family. 'There are things we read in her testimony that reminded us of details that we ourselves had long forgotten, like the motif on the tiles', he later says. Indeed, from the kitchen there was a separate doorway to the basement. And those flesh hooks? Yet another detail that only now recalls memories. 'Of course, then she was in the scullery', the son says. His uncle made meat pies and had created a sort of industrial kitchen in the adjacent building. With a pen in his hand the son draws the route that X1 must have travelled that night. The rugged wooden table, the rain barrel... Yes, yes, his father had left that when he moved out. It is extraordinarily, no question about it."
- In 1984, a tampon with blood on it was found in a building located 30 feet away from the basement in which Christine had been murdered. This matches X1's 1996 testimony that blood in the vagina of Christine had been absorbed with a tampon. The blood type matched that of Christine's. A DNA test was in process in 1999, just as a DNA test on a cigarette butt that had been found at the murder site. However, Van Espen closed the investigation before the results could be made available. Burned notebooks and a satchel belonging to Christine were found in the same building, disproving claims from magistrates that this building was not accessible at the time of the murder. By confusing the description of the building and the basement, these magistrates had first claimed that X1's description of the murder site wasn't correct and that the bloody tampon was irrelevant. However, they were later forced to recant this argument as X1 had always made a clear distinction between the building where the abuse and torture began, and the basement where Christine was ultimately murdered.
- In the last room X1 said she and Christine had been brought, she had seen a rope and a jerrycan. The police report at the time stated that a rope and a jerrycan had been found in the room where Christine had been found.
- According to X1, candles were the only source of light in the building. A candle was among the items found at the murder location.
- Christine's body had been found lying face down, arching back because a metal strand had been tied from her neck to her wrists and on to her ankles. X1 had mentioned how her Christine had been tied up in this same way and with a metal strand.
- According to X1, Christine was set on fire while lying tied up on the ground. The autopsy report of Christine Van Hees showed that her body had been burned to such a degree that it initially was hard to tell her gender.
- X1 described how one of Christine's wrists was penetrated by a "a metal bar... hollow inside... 30 centimeters long". Although the re-readers tried to deny the existence of a wound to Christine's left wrist, the first police commissioner to describe the scene wrote in his official report: "A nail is planted in the left wrist" and indicated that it had been taken from one of the numerous racks that were located in the building. Reading the testimony of X1, the former owner and his family also immediately thought about the racks and estimated the length of these hollow tubes at "30 or 40 centimeters". The "nails" in these racks indeed were thin hollow tubes, which at one time supported the shelves with growing mushrooms. Investigators and magistrates tried to spin the story by claiming that X1 had spoken about a "crucifixion" and specifically a "nail". Earlier, they had tried to claim that no object had penetrated the wrist of Christine. However, they could not convince the officer who had found the body of Christine to change his initial 1984 report.
- According to X1, Michel Vander Elst was the one who beat the nail-like object through Christine's wrist with a hammer. A hammer was found at the location where Christine had been murdered.
- The girl X1 talked about having been murdered was "Chrissie", full name Christine. She gave this name and details about the murder before De Baets and team could match it with the Christine Van Hees murder. Coincidentally, all other details also matched the story of X1.
One wonders how Jean-Claude Van Espen and his aides were able to conclude that X1 could never have been present at the murder of Christine, but that's exactly what they did. Their arguments, which can be read in the 'victim-witnesses' appendix, have been completely discredited. The X1-Christine Van Hees dossier should never have been closed.
Katrien de Cuyper, from Antwerp region:
The 15 year old Katrien de Cuyper disappeared in the evening of December 17, 1991 in Antwerp, after having last been seen making a phone call in the cafe les Routiers (the Truck Drivers). She was found dead 6 months later, on June 22, 1992. The autopsy showed that she had been murdered soon after her kidnapping. Those responsible were never caught.
On February 2, 1997, X1 recognized Katrien de Cuyper from a series of pictures shown to her. She explained how this girl had been taken to a castle and was murdered by a group of individuals that included Tony, Nihoul and Bouty (109). Before she was killed, X1 had noticed that Katrien lacked the routine of the more experienced girls. She thought this girl had been recruited by Tony.
After X1 had given a description of the castle and the route she had travelled, the investigators were able to find the domain in question: Castle Kattenhof in 's Gravenwezel, owned by the de Caters family (110). It turned out that this family owned property in Knokke in streets where X1 had already pointed out some apartments where she had been abused (111). Baron Patrick de Caters, a co-owner of the de Caters domain, is a member of Cercle de Wallonië, together with Etienne Davignon, Prince Philippe de Chimay, Count Jean-Pierre de Launoit (vice-Président Cercle de Lorraine), Elio Di Rupo and Aldo Vastapane. All of these men have been accused of child abuse at some point, although it must be stated that some of the accusations are more reliable than others. Additionally, next to the de Caters domain, the castle of Axel Vervoordt can be found. Vervoordt is a famous art collector, who counts international pop stars and businessmen among his clientele. He too has been accused of pedophilia. More on that later.
The description X1 gave of Katrien was not the most convincing in the world, although the length and hair color of the girl she had seen did approximately match those of Katrien de Cuyper. In any case, the conclusion of the investigators appointed to this specific sub-dossier that Katrien de Cuyper in no way could have been X1's Katrien is definitely an exaggeration. However, the most telling aspect of the X1-Katrien de Cuyper case is not the conclusion of the researchers.
During the observation of Tony Vandenbogaert, X1's former pimp, it had become known that this person was in continuous contact with a gendarme officer from Antwerp. They would regularly call or email each other. But interestingly, after this fact had already become known, this particular gendarme officer was appointed to a leading position in the investigation into this same Tony. De Baets and his team reminded their superiors that this was an obvious conflict of interest. However, no changes were made, and this gendarme officer became one of those responsible for dismissing the possibility that the Katrien described by X1 couldn't possibly have been Katrien de Cuyper (in whose murder Tony was implicated by X1) (112).
| Another interesting fact about the Katrien de Cuyper case was that in mid 1999, when the Dutch police put together a catalog of pictures found at the Zandvoort home of pedophile | ||
 The pictures on the left and right show Katrien de Cuyper in approximately the final year of her life. The central picture shows the girl from the network. The mouth, the nose, the lines underneath her eyes, the shape of the face; even the eyes and eyebrows are far from incompatible. Only the hair has a different color, but there are explanations for that. Click picture to enlarge. | Gerrie Ulrich, there was a porn photo in there of a girl which closely resembled Katrien de Cuyper (113). Among the pictures and documents found at Ulrich's were order forms to make requests for specific forms of child pornography. An investigation showed that Ulrich regularly donated large sums of money to a post office box located above the cafe in Antwerp (The Truck Drivers) where Katrien De Cuyper had last been seen making a phone call. Two Dutch porn firms were located at this address: Studio De Pauw and X-Kiss (114). Whether or not Katrien de Cuyper was found among the pictures in Ulrich's home, in | |
| 2004, the District Attorney's office in Antwerp closed the case by stating that the picture in Ulrich's home was a boy, after having been shown another picture -allegedly a photoshop- of "Katrien" with the body of boy (115). Now seriously, does the girl in the central picture even remotely look like a boy? | ||
The Katrien de Cuyper case might not have been as powerful as the previous three, but it certainly remains interesting. And also in this case there's evidence of a cover up.
Who backed up the claims of X1
As already mentioned, in 1998, prosecutor of the king Jean Soenen stated the following on Belgian national television:
| "... the testimonies of Regina Louf, alias X1, have been closed definitively. As an overall conclusion it can be stated that all her testimonies have been totally unbelievable and the | ||
 Court documents filmed by Zembla showing the quote below in Dutch. It's also possible to largely read "Regina had this relationship WITH her consent and not AGAINST her will." | [inaudible] of pure fantasy." (116) This has since become the consensus view on X1. However, it's a lie. Even if one only pays attention to the official conclusions of the Veronique Dubrulle, Carine Dellaert, Christine Van Hees and Katrien de Cuyper cases, even then it not only has to be acknowledged that it is a fact that Tony Vandenbogaert had sex with X1 since she was at least 12 years old, but also that her parents approved of this relationship. According to the Soenen's own Gent Law Court, in 1998: "It has been established that Regina, between her | |
| twelfth and sixteenth year, had a sexual relationship with a much older and grown man, named Antoine V... Her mother knew about this, allowed the relationship and even encouraged it. Her mother at least felt a platonic love for this same V." | ||
| This was the unescapable conclusion from information provided by X1, followed by confrontations with Tony and her parents. However, after these three were forced to admit | ||
| parts of X1's story, they had to come up with an excuse. That excuse became that X1 -as a 12 year old girl- had taken the actual initiative for the relationship and had pressured her parents into giving Tony a key of the house. As lame as this excuse may sound, Soenen and the Gent Law Court were more than happy to incorporate this excuse into their final conclusion as an undisputed fact: "Regina had this relationship WITH her consent and not AGAINST her will." Soenen's aide, substitute magistrate Nicole |  Left: X1's mother in the late 1970s. Mid and right: X1's parents in 1998, claiming complete ignorance on everything their daughter is talking about. They stated otherwise during interrogations. | |
| De Rouck, repeated this "fact" on national television and added that these events had happened too long ago for Tony still to be prosecuted. | ||
If you read the newspapers you would think otherwise, but X1's statements about her childhood in Gent and Knokke have been confirmed by many witnesses. Here's a list:
| 1. | Tony: | Admitted himself that he had sex with X1 since she was 12 years old (ignoring the testimonies that he already raped X1 at her grandmother's house almost a decade before) and that he had been given a key of the house to enter whenever he pleased (117). |
| 2. | X1's mother: | Besides "admitting" that her 12 or 13 year old daughter had pressured her into giving Tony a key of the house, she confirmed that her daughter indeed had a sexual relationship with Tony (118). |
| 3. | X1's father: | Admitted that Tony came into the house a lot more than he had previously stated. Also admitted that Tony picked Regina up from school and that he took her places (119). |
| 4. | Marleen van Herreweghe: | Classmate who X1 said should have seen some of the abuse in Knokke and Gent. Marleen didn't confirm the abuse in Knokke, but did state that "there were sexual contacts between X1, that Tony, the mother of X1 and the housekeeper." (120) |
| 5. | Carine Verniers: | Housekeeper of X1's mother in the 1980s who apparently didn't do a very good job, as the home of X1 has generally been described as dirty and messy. Pregnant for the first time when she was 18 years old and ended up with 4 children from 3 different men. She was in therapy for a while. Unaware that a camera was taping her confrontation with X1, Verniers accidentally confirmed during a break that Tony, the mother and X1 all had a sexual relationships with each other. She also stated that she didn't believe that X1 was lying. After X1 pushed a little bit, Verniers also confirmed that she suddenly left the house after there were indications that her 18 months old child had been abused. When investigators tried to interview the by then 16 year old daughter, the confrontations ended in panic attacks and denial. No follow-up investigation was carried out. In March 1997, investigators found out that Verniers had a lot of phone conversations with Marleen van Herreweghe. On one day Verniers received 38 telephone calls from acquaintances who also contacted Marleen that same day. The investigators suspected that an effort was made to get the stories of these two women straight (121). |
| 6. | "Odette" (pseudonym): | "Odette" was a mistress of Tony V. in the 1980s. She confirmed that Tony often visited the mother of X1 and that she assumed that Tony had an affair with her. Odette: "I myself was kind of hungry for sex and like Tony there was no one better in bed... He tried to get to know everything about you... He liked to give people the feeling that he could blackmail them... I don't know what to think about the whole X1-affair and I find it hard to believe that Tony had something to do with those child murders. But still. When I read the book of X1, I cannot deny that everything she wrote about Tony is accurate, down to the smallest details. That was a shock to me." (122) |
| 7. | X2: | At least two of the locations in Knokke where X2 claimed to have been abused were also pointed out by X1. Another street designated by X2 faced the hotel of X1's grandmother (123). Additionally, some of the abusers mentioned by X2 turned out to be the same as those mentioned by X1, like Vanden Boeynants, Baron de Bonvoisin and the Lippens brothers. There appears to be some confusion whether or not X1 recognized X2 from a picture (124). |
| 8. | X3 | Mentioned Vanden Boeynants, an abuser that was also reported by X1 and X2. |
| 9. | X4 | X4's parents lived nextdoor to one of the locations where X1 said she and Carine Dellaert had been abused (125). X4 correctly identified both Chantal S. and Nathalie C., youth friends of X1, as victims of the abuse network (126). In turn, Nathalie W. identified by name the mother and a sister of X4 (127). |
| 10. | X7 (Nathalie C.): | Confirmed that she was the best friend of X1 between the age of 10 and 14, that she knew about X1's sexual relationship with Tony (X1 told her since the age of 12) and some of the abuse, that she knew about the sexual relationship between Tony and the mother of X1, that she had visited the house of X1's grandmother and that she was forbidden to visit the the first floor here (128). |
| 11. | Nathalie W. | X1 identified Nathalie W. as a victim of the network (129) and apparently situated her at the sexclub Les Atrebates in the early 1980s (130). X1 also recognized her father (131). Nathalie W., on the other hand, correctly identified the pimp of X1 as "Anthony" and as a friend of Nihoul (whom she also knew) (132). Apparently, both X1 and Nathalie W. independently referred to Nihoul as "Mich" (133). Additionally, X4 identified Nathalie W. while Nathalie W. identified the mother and a sister of X4 by name. |
| 12. | Chantal S.: | Confirmed the abuse of X1 at her grandmother's hotel-villa in Knokke. She remembered only one name, "Monsieur", which turned out to be correct, judging from X1's testimony. Like X7, Chantal gave many details which could be found in the testimonies of others, for example that she was forbidden to cry during the abuse or that she was not allowed to go to the first floor (134). X4 recognized Chantal S. as a victim of the network. |
| 13. | Anja D.: | Classmate of X1 in the early 1980s. Knew about sexual relationship with Tony and that he brought her places (135). |
| 14. | Kristelle M.: | Classmate of X1 in the early 1980s. Confirmed X1's relationship with Tony and that X1 had been made pregnant by this man. Indicated that X1 knew Carine Dellaert (136). |
| 15. | "Fanny V." (pseudonym): | Classmate of Carine Dellaert. Confirmed X1's story about Carine Dellaert and stated that X1 had the same introvert attitude as Carine (137). |
| 16. | Parents of a classmate: | In 1979, X1 mentioned to a classmate the abuse that was going on at her grandmother's hotel-villa. After this girl told her parents, X1 was invited over to retell her story. Knowing that X1 could never know all these details without having experienced them, the parents informed the principal of the school her daughter and X1 went to. X1 went to the principal, a nun, to repeat the story and showed the bruises in her neck. The nun told X1 that she was "a fantasizer" and called up her grandmother. Besides being heavily punished, X1 was sent back to her parents in Gent in an effort to stop the rumors that were going round the neighborhood by now. When X1 disappeared from school, the parents of X1's classmate assumed that she had been taken up in a child protection program. However, more than 10 years later they found out that this had not been the case. The girl, nor her parents were asked to testify about X1. (138) |
| 17. | Mieke: | Girl from the network who went to live with X1 and her husband in 1998. She was never asked to testify, but apparently could verify many aspects of X1's story. She is not to be confused with Marie-Theresa "Mieke" from X1's testimony on Christine Van Hees. (139) |
Dismantling the investigation
The initial investigation into Dutroux and Nihoul was headed by Michel Bourlet, the prosecutor of the king in the Neufchateau district, and examining magistrate Jean-Marc Connerotte. These two men already had gained somewhat of a martyr status, because several years before the Dutroux case they had been taken off the investigation into the murder of the socialist leader Andre Cools, apparently right before being able to solve the case. Then, in 1996, when they finally found two missing girls -alive- they became national heroes overnight.
It was Connerotte who appointed BOB officer Patriek De Baets and his team to the X1 case in early September 1996. In this function De Baets worked directly for Connerotte and could work relatively autonomous from his superiors in the BOB and the overall gendarmerie.
| The first major change in the investigation occurred on October 14, 1996. Connerotte was removed as examining magistrate, the reason being that he had attended a fund raising | ||
 Jean-Marc Connerotte, sacked from the Dutroux investigation before it ever really got off the ground. | for parents of missing children. The problem here was that Sabine and Laetitia, the girls he had personally rescued from Dutroux's dungeon, were present at this meeting as guests of honor. The lawyers of Dutroux and Nihoul had gotten wind of this visit and began a successful procedure to remove Connerotte, arguing that the examining magistrate had shown with this visit that he wasn't carrying out his investigation objectively enough. Although many wonder how Connerotte could have | |
| been so careless, especially with such a sensitive case, there are quite a number of extenuating circumstances. For example, Connerotte, who was on leave and had married earlier that day, made sure to pay for the plate of spaghetti he was given, made sure that he did not to meet with the girls or their parents, declined to accept flowers from Laetitia and Sabine, and handed over the fountain pen the guests had been given to a judicial registrar (140). Also, Connerotte barely stayed an hour, but with this visit he and Bourlet (who also went) made yet another effort to change the consensus view that the justice department wasn't interested in parents of missing children or victims of child abuse. | ||
All these facts didn't matter and Connerotte was replaced by the inexperienced examining magistrate Jacques Langlois. As rumors of a cover-up had already begun to spread, the removal sparked massive protests all around the country. In Brussels alone, more than 300,000 people went to the streets to protest (the famous White March), but it changed nothing.
| As the prosecutor of the King, Bourlet was not forced to step down. However, the examining magistrate does the majority of the in depth investigations. Therefore Bourlet's | ||
| hands were largely tied when Langlois came in and immediately decided that he didn't want to hear anything about child abuse networks. Langlois became one of those responsible for dismantling the whole Dutroux investigation by ignoring countless leads and sending his investigators off into all kinds of bogus issues. A second major change occurred in early December 1996. Until that point, as said before, the BOB officers working with the various X-witnesses worked independently from the BOB and gendarmerie hierarchy. They had a supporting role in the Dutroux investigation and answered directly to Bourlet and Connerotte, and later on to the much less interested Langlois. However, on December 1, all the inspectors working on the sub-dossiers of the Dutroux affair, including the X-Dossiers, were brought together in a large secured building just outside Brussels. Gendarmerie Commandant Jean-Luc Duterme was appointed head of this investigating cell and was able to heavily influence the ongoing investigations. With Langlois and Duterme in place the overall Dutroux investigation began to take a dramatic turn for the worse. In complete contrast with Connerotte and Bourlet, Langlois |  Michel Bourlet, prosecutor of the king in Neufchateau since 1984. Has always been on the side of Connerotte, De Baets and X1, even though his hands were tied. Had a hilarious run in with Baron de Bonvoisin, one of the most notorious suspects in the X-Dossiers, very early on in the investigation. De Bonvoisin had arranged a meeting in his castle with some of the Dutroux case investigators, during which he called Bourlet and tried to make an appointment. Bourlet pretended to accept a meeting for the next day, but never showed up. | |
| did not communicate directly with the interviewers of the various X-witnesses, but went to Commandant Duterme instead (141). While Duterme secretly, and without having the proper authority, began to "reread" the testimonies of the X-witnesses, Langlois dived head on into leads that Connerotte and Bourlet had suspected from day one to be disinformation (142). The major examples would be: | ||
- the digs in Jumet, which were inspired by the bogus claims of convicted pedophile Jean-Paul Raemaekers;
- the November 1996 Oliver Trusgnach case in which high level politicians Elio Di Rupo and Jean-Pierre Grafe were implicated as pedophiles;
- the prominent December 12, 1996 search of the Gnostic-Luciferian (Satanic) Abrasax cult.
The Jumet digs and the Oliver Trusgnach case were complicated disinformation schemes, ultimately meant to provide "skeptics" with examples that Neufchateau investigators could easily be fooled by captured child abusers and fantasists who make up stories. In fact, in a truly Machiavellian way, De Baets and his team were forced, without knowing anything about the case, to take up a primary role in the Trusgnach case the day before all the (soon to be discredited) accusations would be published in the press. Police commissioner Georges Marnette played a central role in both of these disinformation schemes, about which you can read in detail in 'the accused' appendix. Why there? Because both X2 and Nathalie W. identified Marnette as an abuser in the network (143).
The Abrasax story is less complicated. The following well known newspaper report, published on December 29, 1996 by the Sunday Times, is one of the best examples in which some of the most accurate (albeit hard to believe) information appears to have been strategically mixed in with a central piece of disinformation.
| "SATANIC sects involved in bizarre rites including human sacrifice are being linked by Belgian police with this summer's string of grisly paedophile murders in which at least four children died. Five witnesses came forward last week and described how black masses were held, at which children were killed in front of audiences said to have included prominent members of Belgian | ||
 Picture of Abrasax headquarters in the small, stuffy home of Francis "Anubis- Moloch" Desmedt and Dominique "Nahema-Nephthys" Kindermans where maybe 20 persons could be involved in a ritual at the same time. The profoundly negative Abrasax cult consisted of four institutes: The Belgian Church of Satan, the Wicca center, the Order for Luciferian Initiation and the Gnostic church. Psychotherapy was also practiced here. Keep the following in mind: like Jumet didn't disprove the existence of a network surrounding Nihoul and the Trusgnach case didn't disprove high level involvement in abuse networks, so the Abrasax disinformation doesn't prove (high level) Satanism doesn't exist. It's important to note that there are innumerable and very similar reports of cultist or Satanic practices in combination with child abuse. Going through US and UK newspaper archives since the late 1970s will turn up thousands of (mainly superficial) reports on ritual abuse and Satanism. In the X-Dossiers there also appear a fair dose of reports on Satanism and ritual abuse, which is not necessarily the same thing. You can read these reports in the 'victims and witnesses' appendix. More information on this aspect in part 15. | society. One investigator said it was "like going back to the Middle Ages". The tentacles of the sects appear to have stretched beyond the borders of Belgium to Holland, Germany and even America. The witnesses - several of whom claim to have received death threats - say that young babies were handed over by their parents willingly in return for money. In other cases the victims were abducted. [PEHI note: The incest aspect should definitely have been described here. The "abductions" should also have been explained in more detail] The witnesses, who are believed to have identified the sites where the masses took place to the police, said organisers had also photographed participants and threatened to hand over their pictures if they went to the police. The investigation centres on Abrasax [the crucial piece of disinformation], a self-styled institute of black magic, whose headquarters in the village of Forchies-la-Marche in southern Belgium was raided by police last week. Human skulls were among the objects removed from the run-down building. ... Police have long suspected that Dutroux, a convicted paedophile, was part of an international network which abducted children, sexually abused them and then killed them. Their activities appear to have been financed by the sale of pornographic videos filmed by members of the ring. ... Investigators are still trying to determine the precise nature of the links between the Satanists and the paedophile groups. In a separate twist, a Belgian newspaper claimed yesterday that a former European commissioner was among a group of judges, senior politicians, lawyers and policemen who attended orgies held in a Belgian chateau and organised by Michel Nihoul, one of Dutroux's alleged accomplices. La Derniere Heure, which claimed to have a guest list, did not name the commissioner but said he "came with a girl, Josette, nicknamed Jojo, the Bomb". Everything mentioned in this article is accurate, meaning that this is what a number of anonymous (to the public) witnesses were testifying about in Neufchateau at that | |
| moment. Although not all spoke about Satanism, at least half of them did. But besides the exaggerated focus on Satanism, the disinformation here is that this whole Satanic or sectarian aspect of the investigation centered around the Abrasax cult. The X-Dossiers had absolutely nothing to do with Abrasax and even though there might have been some circumstantial Dutroux/Weinstein- related evidence against the cult to justify a house search some day (144), there's no good reason why, with all those other promising leads, this questionable and highly delicate one had to be picked out for a premature house search. Unless, of course, the aim was to discredit the whole investigation, which is what Connerotte and his chief investigator De Baets have publicly stated (145). The basic idea was to discredit any future claims of Satanism and extreme abuse by bringing up the (soon to be discredited) Abrasax affair. This motive also becomes obvious when one learns that Duterme, with the consent of Langlois, scrapped all of the 43 house searches recommended by De Baets and Bourlet. Their list was based on the most promising information supplied by the X-witnesses, which indeed included "a former European commissioner... judges, senior politicians, lawyers and policemen" (146). | ||
By the time the Abrasax story hit the news, it was clear that Duterme was in town. He had gathered a small group of vicious debunkers around him, the most prominent being Eddy Verhaeghen, Baudouin Dernicourt and Philippe Pourbaix. When the main interviewer of Nathalie W. suffered a stroke in late January 1997, Duterme replaced this person and his partner with Dernicourt and Pourbaix. Nathalie had trusted her first interviewers and although testifying was a huge mental challenge for her, she did provide certain names and details that matched with those provided by other X-witnesses (147). This all changed when Dernicourt and Pourbaix went after Nathalie like a couple of attack dogs. They managed to completely destabilize the victim in a matter of one or two hearings. In March Nathalie dropped from the investigation (148).
The other favorite BOB officer of Duterme, Eddy Verhaeghen, played a key role in discrediting X1. In July 1997, Duterme's first version of the re-reads of the X1 interviews was done. Based on these re-reads De Baets and his team were fired later that month, and Verhaeghen became the new chief interviewer of X1. X1 describes how things changed:
"The two BOB officers with whom I have to work from now on come to pick me up for an 'informal' talk... The three of us go and sit at a table in a village cafeteria... Eddy voices my suspicions in the following words: 'We don't care if it is true or not. The only thing that matters to me is my paycheck at the end of the month.' I smile worryingly. Am I psychic after all? The discussion proceeds in the expected direction. The security- and investigative brigade of the gendarmerie thinks that the ball is in my court. I am the one who has to come up with evidence, they won't do any field- or investigative work anymore. In these words they ask for my cooperation. When I state that I do not have the authority to conduct searches, nor that I can come up with evidence if they are not willing to investigate, they just laugh at me... Eddy begins to insinuate that it all couldn't have been so bad. Because, look, I have a husband and four kids, I have everything that I wish and also, I can laugh... 'Come on', Eddy says rather loud, 'you also enjoyed it, didn't you? You can't say that everything was bad? You were in love with Tony, weren't you?' After exactly one year of hearings, in which I was treated with respect, I politely try to explain my feelings. I wasn't 'in love' with him, I loved him; like a daughter loves her father [at least, that's what she tried to convince herself of as a young girl]..."
"I am only really disheartened when Eddy and his colleague interrogate my friend Tania. This happens in such a dehumanizing manner that I begin to feel sick. Her hearing is not recorded on video, and they know it. The two BOB officers eagerly use their power position to destabilize and intimidate Tania by bringing up her personal life. They question her in an office where every BOB officer walks in and out of, and where my supposedly well-protected dossiers are up for grabs. Tania asks what her personal life has to do with the case. After all, she did nothing more than encourage me to testify, and made the first telephone contact with Connerotte... Are you also a victim? Were you also in the network? You're not going to tell me that you didn't have anything to do with the network of Ginie? Have you known De Baets a long time? Was this really the first time you spoke to him, the 4th of September 1996? Are you sure you never were in the prostitution? Are you really sure? The discussion continues along these lines the whole afternoon. Tania is intimidated. Tania even became so scared that she comes to me in the late afternoon, looks silently at me for a while and then advises me to stop testifying. For the first time my friend understands my words just before she phoned up Connerotte in '96: 'This is too big, Tania, I can't do anything against my perpetrators." (149)
| De Baets and his team were fired on charges that they would have manipulated X1 into saying things that they wanted to hear. Continuous leaks to the press were organized in the | ||
 January 2000, Patriek De Baets (left) and Aime Bille (right), leaving the Palace of Justice in Brussels after having been fully acquitted of any wrongdoing in working with the X-witnesses. | following months that were supposed to prove this accusation. However, an official investigation had also been launched and in 2000 the Court of Law in Brussels concluded that there was no evidence at all that De Baets and his team had been manipulating X1. One of the main accusation against De Baets was that he had not filed an official report of the fact that X1 misidentified Christine Van Hees from a series of pictures. This turned out to be lie, as this report, PV 117.487, December 6, 1997, had been written and properly filed by his assistant interviewer Philippe | |
| Hupez. Hupez had written many other official reports about his work with X1, so chances that this was a honest mistake of Duterme are pretty low. | ||
And even the simple accusation of the rereaders that X1 had misidentified Christine Van Hees is misleading, since in the supposedly missing PV 117.487 Hupez explained it point blank that X1 intentionally didn't point out Christine.
"X1 testified to have recognized Christine between the pictures presented to her, but does not identify the picture she recognizes... We conclude from this: 1. the picture P10, pointed out by X1, is not the victim she spoke about, Christine. 2. But the photo of the victim was among those shown to X1 [5 in total], which she intentionally didn't point out."
Of course, it's reasonable to be skeptical about the claim of Hupez and De Baets that X1 "intentionally" didn't point out Christine. It seems that either they tried to manipulate the investigation, or it must have been very clear to them that X1 was not cooperating. According to X1, it's the latter. She explained:
"In order to judge objectively what happened there that morning, you need to be able to take a look at the tape of that hearing... you would see that after I pointed to the picture P10 I looked at De Baets and Hupez with an exultant look on my face. Like: and now it's your turn!... It was 7 o'clock in the morning. I was sick and tired of it, I wanted to go home. If I had pointed out Christine... De Baets undoubtedly would have continued for another hour or three. In my stubbornness I wanted to make them feel that they should have given me more time. I take comfort in one thought though: if the successors of De Baets had not seized this opportunity to seed doubt in everything, they undoubtedly would have found something else." (150)
Until the video of X1's interview is made public there might be some lingering doubt about the explanations given by X1 and the interviewers. However, their stories are coherent, the interviewers were acquitted from accusations that they manipulated, and it has not been them who continually changed their story. The only thing the interviewers can be accused of is of having pushed this interview with X1, which started on 22:55 PM, too far.
There are numerous other examples of manipulations by the rereaders. The authors of 'The X-Dossiers' filled an entire book with them. In a number of chapters they quote large portions of the reports written by the rereaders and compare them to the original testimonies.
Although in most cases it seemed intentional, one of the first things that became obvious was that Duterme nor the other rereaders fully mastered the Dutch language; the language in which X1 testified. Duterme would continually ask questions about passages which would be completely clear to anyone speaking perfect Dutch (like the author of this article). Duterme probably made one of his biggest mistakes when he concluded from one of X1's statements that her grandmother had also been present at the murder of Christine Van Hees. The only thing that X1 had said here was: 'My grandmother also had those in her scullery' [referring to meat hooks she had seen in the champignon factory] (151).
In another case, Duterme did not understand that the word "bus" has more than one meaning in Dutch. He apparently knew that it could refer to a vehicle that drives on the road, but forgot that it can also refer to a small container in which things can be put (a "can" or "small box", usually metal). Describing the location where Christine Van Hees had been murdered, X1 at some point spoke about a "bus" containing a liquid. In another place she called this object a "jerrycan". Duterme wrote next to the sentence containing "jerrycan" that this is a different object than the "bus containing liquid" described earlier, which is complete madness (152).
Baudouin Dernicourt, who had come up with the false statement that De Baets and Hupez had not filed an official report of X1 misidentifying Christine Van Hees, made even worse "mistakes". Pertaining to Carine "Clo" Dellaert which X1 was to identify from a set of pictures, X1 at one point stated: "Not that I saw, but..." and "... she wasn't in there also". In Dernicourt's translations this became: "I know that I saw her..." and "Wasn't she in there also?" (153) Just incredible.
There are numerous other incorrect statements from the rereaders that were echoed all over the media. Take the following two sentences from a widely-read newspaper report published on February 5, 2004, just before the final Dutroux-Nihoul trial:
"On pictures of missing children which are presented to her, she [X1] identifies Loubna Benaissa, Kim and Ken Heyrman and the Dutch Naatje Zwaren de Zwarenstein as victims of the network. Later it would come out that Loubna was murdered by the psychopath Patrick Derochette. Naatje van Zwaren de Zwarenstein turned out not to be missing at all. The investigators had been mistaken when they showed this picture to X1, it turned out." (154)
Now let's take a look at the facts. Loubna was a 9 year old girl when she disappeared in August 1995. She was found dead on March 5, 1997 in the home of the pedophile Patrick Derochette. Four days before this event, X1 had been talking about children she had witnessed being killed in snuff movies. De Baets at some point had asked if one of these children might have been Loubna, to which Regina's only answer was "could be". The rereaders somehow interpreted this as meaning "yes". The rereaders went on to claim that in this same interview X1 had also stated to have witnessed the murder of Kim and Ken Heyrman. This is also false. X1 had spoken about a brother and sister. De Baets had asked X1 outside of the official interview if this might have been Kim and Ken. Again X1's only answer was: "Could be, I don't know." (155)
Besides echoing the false statements of the rereaders, most newspapers didn't report a whole lot about the the Loubna Benaissa and Kim and Ken Heyrman cases. The parents of both of these children had been treated very badly by the investigators. In case of Loubna Benaissa, separate leads to the law clerk of Jean-Claude Van Espen (head of the X1-Van Hees dossier), Christine Van Hees case and the Dutroux-Nihoul network had been ignored (156). In case of Kim and Ken Heyrman, their mother, Tiny Mast, became a good friend of X1. She stated:
"I don't trust those people at all. It is they who lost the sweater of Ken. The kidnapper had sent me that sweater, probably to scare me, I assume. In a normal country that is a hyper-important element in the investigation. Traces might be be found on it. Well, they just made that sweater disappear. It is they who at a certain point told me in my face that I was the murderer and that I'd better fess up. I can tell hundreds of stories which, if I compare them with what the Verwilghen commission labeled as "mistakes", really stretch the imagination. Those guys are so aggressive and so inhumane that I sometimes feel that they are part of the same clique as those who took away my children. I believe Regina Louf, I really do." (157)
For a change, the newspaper's claim that X1 had identified Naatje van Zwaren de Zwarenstein is accurate. This happened during the same interview in which X1 recognized Katrien de Cuyper. However, this case had no priority status and X1 never said more about Naatje than: "a girl of which I think I have seen her at one point" (158). Also, the newspaper's claim that Naatje "turned out not to be missing at all" is extremely misleading for a number of reasons.
The 14 year old Naatje went missing on March 12, 1976, three days after one of her alleged friends, Paulette N., had also disappeared. The media made no big deal out of the event, especially not when Naatje turned up again on April 7 of that year in the Netherlands. However, friends of Naatje told a disturbing story to investigators, a story which sounded awfully similar to the one of the X-witnesses 20 years later. They named Naatje's riding school, coincidentally the same as Christine Van Hees', as one of the locations through which a child prostitution ring operated. This ring, in which Naatje and Paulette had ended up, apparently provided services to several foreign embassies in Brussels and had connections in the Netherlands and England. One of the girls who knew Naatje and Paulette was Joëlle J. Besides regular abuse and beatings, Joëlle also spoke about forced abortions, orgies at which children were cut to pieces and people who had been beaten up or killed for having spoken about the network. Other girls from this abuse network, Marie V. and Mireille D.B., backed up portions of the story of Joëlle J. Immediately after Naatje's return, she moved with her parents to the United States, but died there in 1980 in a traffic accident. (159)
Another argument that was used against X1 was the claim that Christine Van Hees' mother had tricked X1 during a confrontation on March 3, 1998. Van Hees' mother spoke about her daughter's trip to Canada just weeks before she was murdered, and asked X1 if Christine had mentioned anything to her about this trip. According to substitute magistrate Paule Somers, "X1 immediately remembered what Christine had told about that. But mother Van Hees tricked X1, because Christine had never been to Canada." This was an argument that severely impacted the credibility of X1 in the eyes of those who until then were still willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.
In early 1999, the Brussels lawyer Patricia Vandersmissen became interested in defending X1 against the constant barrage of press attacks. But before she would commit herself to the X1 case, she asked permission to access a portion of the X1-dossier to check a number of statements from X1 that had appeared in the press. One of those she was most interested in was X1's supposed confirmation of Christine's fictitious trip to Canada. The confrontation, which was led by Danny De Pauw (who betrayed De Baets and team) and the notoriously inaccurate translator Baudouin Dernicourt, was recorded on video and in writing. According to Vandersmissen:
"Antoinette Vanhoucke [mother Van Hees]: 'And in the mean time she made a big trip. She goes to Canada. Did she never speak about that?'
Regina Louf [X1]: 'I don't think we ever had the chance, to speak about those things.'"
"That's what has been written down. Nothing else. I read the official report from front to back and from back to front. I restarted three times, continually looking if that mother had brought up the topic again. But no. This is everything that has been said about the trip to Canada: nothing. Regina Louf says that she knows nothing about the trip to Canada. The truth has been reversed for the public." (160)
And so the disinformation game continues. There are so many examples and different aspects to discuss that the authors of the book 'The X-Dossiers' were able to fill a 500+, large page, small type book with them. To summarize, the tactics used by the rereaders can be found in almost any other disinformation scheme:
- Most statements of X1 were ignored.
- A number of statements were invented and attributed to X1.
- Bizarre conclusions were drawn from isolated passages of the testimony of X1.
- Small details in X1's testimony that appear to be wrong were given much more attention than any of the more important aspects that appeared to be right.
- One-sided leaks were organized to the media.
- De Baets and his team were portrayed as worshippers of X1, who in turn was portrayed as a self-absorbed aspiring cult leader.
- All searches at individuals and locations named by the X-witnesses were canceled. Except for a few bogus locations, searches were only carried out at the homes of the victim-witnesses and at those who supported them.
Questionable and extremely compromised researchers
It is a fairly well known fact that Nihoul was a BOB informant (161). Details about Nihoul's direct and indirect connections to officers heading his own investigation are virtually unknown.
Above you can see the basic final structure of the X-Dossier investigation. X1 worked with Eddy Verhaeghen and Danny De Pauw, who had replaced Patriek De Baets and Philippe Hupez. Coincidentally, Verhaeghen was one of Nihoul's runners during the time that this gangster was an informant to the BOB (162).
Victim Nathalie W. was forced to work with Baudouin Dernicourt and Philippe Pourbaix. They had replaced Theo Vandyck and Joël Gerard in early February 1997. Dernicourt has been tied to the terrorist CCC bombings (163), officially a radical communist group, but in reality a fascist Gladio operation, similar to the Gang of Nijvel (164).
The other X-witnesses were handled by other BOB officers, who, since December 1, 1996, had all been placed under the authority of Commandant Jean-Luc Duterme. Duterme had already made a name for himself in the 1980s as the right hand man of prosecutor Jean Depretre in the Gang of Nijvel investigation. Together they did a lot of damage to the investigation and persecuted officers who wanted to find out the truth. Depretre earlier played a key role in terminating the 1979 Montaricourt-Israel investigations, which involved a high level European-wide prostitution network (165). Depretre was accused by X2 of being involved in the child abuse network (166).
Jean-Luc Duterme had been appointed head of the Neufchateau cell by Lt.-Col. Jean-Marie Brabant, the commandant of the BOB in Brussels. Brabant, as well as Lt.-Col. Guido Torrez, head of the gendarmerie in Neufchateau, were Duterme's immediate superiors.
Just after Nihoul and Bouty had been arrested, Brabant was caught lying to examining magistrate Connerotte when he denied that the BOB had any earlier dossiers on Michel Nihoul or Annie Bouty. They had dossiers on both of them (167). Brabant apparently also lied to prosecutor Bourlet when he tried to explain to him that the Dutroux-Nihoul investigation was taking away resources from other important dossiers. Unfortunately for Brabant, not one of the investigators working for Neufchateau had been taken from Brabant's most important dossiers, like KB-Lux. That is, according to Patriek De Baets (168).
Lt.-Col. Torrez, Duterme's immediate superior in Neufchateau, is known to have taken an order from Nihoul in October 1986 to leave one of his mafia business partners, a Portuguese named Juan Borges, alone. Borges had ties to the Italian mafia, the fascist underground and the Security Bureau of the European Union/Commission. Just as telling, Torrez was a very good friend of Brussels police commissioner Georges Marnette. They both were supporters of the soccer club Anderlecht and could often be seen at matches together (169).
Marnette is one of the most shadowy characters in the whole Dutroux-Nihoul affair. His history and manipulations are far too complex to be discussed in this article, but have been recorded in great detail in 'the accused' appendix. As already stated, Marnette can be found in that list because both X2 and Nathalie W. fingered him as an abuser in the network. Marnette's close friend, Jean-Paul Dumont, who apparently aided in some of the manipulations (170), has even more accusations of sadistic child abuse against him (171). Dumont, once a CEPIC director, was on close terms with some of the most notorious abusers in the X-Dossiers, including Paul Vanden Boeynants and Baron de Bonvoisin (172), not to mention Michel Nihoul (173). Marnette is known to have been a frequent visitor of the Les Atrebates sex orgy club and the later Dolo (174), Nihoul's favorite hang-outs (175), and therefore an obvious co-partouzer of Nihoul (176).
But the cover-up, as might be expected, is known to have been supported at an even higher level. Col. Torrez and Col. Brabant both were subordinate to Lt.-Gen. Herman Fransen, the long time chief of staff to Lt.-Gen. Willy Deridder, the overall commandant of the gendarmerie. In May 1998, Fransen himself became head of the gendarmerie while Deridder moved on to one of the top seats at Interpol. Fransen had a younger brother, Col. Hubert Fransen, who was a senior officer in the Inspection Department (including Internal Affairs) of the gendarmerie. In early 1999, Col. Hubert Fransen was appointed head of investigation of the Pignolet inquiry, which unsuccessfully had tried to substantiate the accusations of Duterme and Van Espen against De Baets for over a year at that point. Fransen's predecessor had been fired after informing Pignolet once again that he was chasing ghosts. Under Fransen the "investigation" intensified. The home of Tania V., the good friend of X1, was searched, possible ties between X1 and Gang of Nijvel victims were searched, and helicopters were used to shoot aerial pictures of a villa which might have played a central role in the "De Baets-X1 conspiracy". This bogus investigation became almost as expensive as the original X1 investigation itself. But still, nothing was found and De Baets was acquitted.
Besides police commissioner Georges Marnette, the gendarmerie always had outside support of the media and most magistrates. X-Dossier examining magistrate Jacques Langlois, who had replaced Connerotte, was the most important of these, followed by Jean-Claude Van Espen and prosecutor Jean Soenen.
Langlois and his family have been a long time PSC supporters. It was the PSC, and Joseph Michel, once a minister of the PSC under Paul Vanden Boeynants, in particular, to whom Langlois owed his legal career. Michel introduced Langlois to politics in 1988 and made him a magistrate in 1993. Going back to the 1970s, Michel had been a founding member of the fascist think tank within the PSC, CEPIC (177), which was largely coordinated by Paul Vanden Boeynants and Baron de Bonvoisin, both accused of extreme child abuse by several X-witnesses. In 1978, Joseph Michel was contacted by a jailed Jean-Michel Nihoul, and became responsible for his early release (178). In the aftermath of Connerotte's removal and replacement with Langlois, it was claimed that Michel had largely been directing these events (179).
Langlois did a lot to dismantle the X-investigation and the Nihoul dossier, but one example in particular shows that he could get away with anything. Langlois had been meeting with the producers of 'Au Nom de la Loi', an influential French-language TV program. Following these meetings, 'Au Nom de la Loi' broadcasted four extremely manipulative prime-time tv programs from 1997 to 2000 in which they tried to convince the public that Nihoul was an innocent victim in the whole Dutroux affair. The major problem with Langlois having met with the media (not to mention, having directed these manipulative programs), is that it couldn't have been more out of line with his function as a supposedly objective examining magistrate. Langlois' predecessor Connerotte was fired for reasons that were peanuts compared to what he did. And yet, most of the media came out in defense of Langlois. (180)
| Probably the most blatant example of a conflict-of-interest in the Dutroux, Nihoul and X- Dossier investigations is Jean-Claude Van Espen, who had been assigned to the X1- Christine Van Hees case. As you might still remember, Nihoul and Bouty were named by X1 as some of the individuals present at Christine's murder. Now, isn't it interesting that | ||
 Jean-Claude Van Espen, one of the most blatant examples of a conflict-of-interest in the Dutroux- Nihoul case. | Van Espen used to do some part-time work in the law firm of Annie Bouty and Michel Nihoul? His sister, Francoise Van Espen, had married one of the partners in this firm, Philippe Deleuze, and used to act as the godmother of Nihoul's son. Deleuze, who was an important CEPIC member, apparently became responsible with Paul Vanden Boeynants for kickstarting Van Espen's career as an examining magistrate. PV 10.543, October 8, 1996, hearing of Nihoul: "He [Nihoul] knew Van Espen when this person was an occasional collaborator in the office of Annie Bouty and Philippe Deleuze. The sister of Jean Claude Van Espen is the wife of Philippe Deleuze and is the godmother of the son of Jean Michel Nihoul. Jean Claude Van Espen would have been appointed a magistrate after Paul Vanden Boeynants, Philippe Deleuze intervened in his favor. Nihoul declares to have learned from lawyer Vidick | |
| that Van Espen would have been involved in a child molestation network." | ||
Except for Nihoul's last statement, these claims have been repeated and expanded upon in several media outlets and never been disputed. It's hard to tell why Nihoul would implicate Van Espen in a child molestation network, although it could well be to send a message to the magistrate and other top officials to pressure them into getting him released. After all, pressure and blackmail is the major trait of the network.
By now you might have noticed that the words CEPIC and PSC have begun to appear in increasing frequency. That's not a coincidence and this aspect will be explored a bit further in this article.
The accused in finance
A bit of history first. The land which eventually became the state of Belgium has mainly been a battleground between Catholic and Liberal-Protestant interests. Over the centuries and decades, this land subsequently belonged to the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, Napoleon's France and since 1815, the Netherlands. In 1830, mainly the Catholic middle and upper class living in the southern provinces of the United Netherlands had become so fed up with their lack of self-determination that they staged a revolution. It succeeded and the state of Belgium was born. Families like de Merode and De Ligne were initially offered the throne, but they refused and the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas came in.
The major bank in Belgium and the central pillar of its industry was Societe Generale des Pays-Bas, established by King William I of Orange in 1822 for the exact purpose of financing the growth of Belgian industry. After the revolution the name changed to Societe Generale de Belgique and some of Belgium's major aristocratic families gained control over it. This control by families as de Merode, de Meeus, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Janssen, Lippens, Boël and Solvay remained throughout the 19th and 20th century, with the Vatican bank also holding a significant stake. William of Orange eventually let go of the bank.
Societe Generale's influence over the Belgian economy has always been huge, controlling anywhere between 25 and 50 percent of Belgium's manufacturing industry. (181) It was only in 1988 that the unimaginable happened: the French Suez group took over the bank, and with that, a large chunk of Belgium's economy. Viscount Etienne Davignon was made chairman and remained in that position until 2001. Count Maurice Lippens became the bank's vice chairman.
The other major historical bank/holding firm in Belgium is Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, its history starting around 1830 when a banker named Lazare Richtenberger became an agent of the London Rothschilds. The son-in-law of Richtenberger, Samuel Lambert, took over the business ten years later. The Rothschilds would often come and visit Samuel and his son Leon in Brussels to advise them on social and political events affecting the markets. Especially James de Rothschild made sure that Banque Lambert focused on financing the railroad companies, like the Morgans, Harrimans and Schiffs were doing in the United States. Leon married Zoe Lucie de Rothschild in 1882, fulfilled diplomatic functions and became the most important financial advisor to King Leopold II of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. When Leopold II acquired the Congo as his own private slave colony in 1885, Leon took over a large part of the financial matters there. (182) Ironically, the Rothschild-backed Cecil Rhodes was one of Leopold's competitors in Africa.
The Lamberts appear to have remained close associates of the Rothschilds until this day (183), but their influence in Belgian banking seems to have waned. Banque Bruxelles Lambert has been taken over by the Dutch bank ING in 1998 while the Lamberts only have a honorary mentioning in the list of directors of Groupe Bruxelles Lambert (GBL). The Belgian Frere and Canadian Desmarais families are the ones in control of GBL these days. These two families also have a large influence on the Suez group, which owns Societe Generale. In other words, Belgium's primary banks are fully or largely owned by Dutch, Canadian or French interests.
Another important aristocratic Belgian company is the chemical giant Solvay, founded in 1863 by the Solvay family. It went public in 1967, but the Solvay and Boël families were able to keep control over the company through their holding Union Financiere Boël. The Janssens, De Selliers De Moranvilles and Karel van Miert are also major shareholders of Solvay, or today's holding company, Solvac. In 2003, van Miert replaced Etienne Davignon as director of Solvay.
Below is a table which shows some of the interaction between the premier industrial and banking families of Belgium. Although it was tighter in previous decades, before the nouveau riche and foreign interests mixed in, Belgium's economy is still controlled by a small oligarchy of aristocratic families centered around the royal court.
| Societe Generale | Friends of Europe* | GBL | Fortis | Sofina | Finasucre | UFB, Solvac & Solvay |
| Boël | Davignon | Desmarais | Davignon | Boël | Boël | Boël |
| Davignon | Janssen | Frere | Janssen | Davignon | Lippens | Davignon |
| Janssen | Solvay | Lambert | Lippens | Janssen | Janssen | |
| Lippens de Merode | de Launoit Lippens | Selliers de Moranville | van Miert Selliers de | |||
| Saxe-Coburg | Vastapane | Moranville | ||||
| Solvay | Solvay | |||||
Involvement of the families over the years in major banks and corporations. *Not a company, but still interesting | ||||||
Besides the royal family, Viscount Etienne Davignon is probably the most well known of this group internationally. Although he comes from a less influential family than the others that are listed, Davignon might well be the most influential person of mainland Europe in the globalization process, with a particular focus on integrating Europe along the lines of Anglo-Saxon liberal policies. Besides his positions in the companies above, Davignon has held (or still holds) the following positions:
- first president of the International Energy Agency (IEA)
- director of Kissinger Associates and good friend of Henry Kissinger
- director of Minorco/Anglo-American Corporation
- vice-president of the European Commission
- co-founder of the European Round Table of Industrialists with someone who at different times worked for the Rockefellers, Kissinger, Rothschilds and Lazard bank
- co-founder and president of the Association for the Monetary Union of Europe
- chairman of CSR Europe (European business network)
- founder of the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation
- chairman of the EU-Japan Business Dialogue
- co-founder and president of Friends of Europe
- director of the European Institute
- allegedly a former governor of Ditchley
- chairman of the Royal Institute for International Relations (Belgian version of RIIA)
- member of the US Council on Foreign Relations
- member of the Trilateral Commission
- honorary chairman of Bilderberg
One of Davignon's closest sidekicks in business and the globalization process is Count Maurice Lippens, whom he really got to know in the late 1980s when both ran Societe Generale. Together they also ran the Belgian branch of the Dutch-Belgian Fortis Bank and they set up SN Brussels Airlines. Maurice visited Bilderberg in 2000, 2002, and 2006 and has become an annual visitor of the Trilateral Commission in recent years. About these meetings he stated:
"I have never visited DAVOS and think it's one big carnival. I receive the membership lists and can, if I want to, call up anyone I'm interested in. I like to visit Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission. Bilderberg is intense. There one has to work from the early morning to the late evening. The Round Table of Industrialists is interesting, but I'm not a member because I'm not an Industrialist. Talking about the future of the world is a difficult thing by the way. I do like to listen and network in Washington with the Trilateral Commission. You'll hear about interesting trends from first hand." (184)
Now, why is all this important you ask? Well, for starters because the Lippens family appears all over the X-Dossiers. X1, X2, X4, and two anonymous letters all name Maurice Lippens and his brother Leopold, the long time mayor of Knokke, as vicious child abusers, not only involved in regular rape, but also in the snuff network (185). Additionally, a relative of them, Count Francois Lippens, the honorary consul general of Belgium, appears somewhere deep in the Dutroux dossier:
| "Transmitted to examining magistrate Mr. LANGLOIS in Neufchâteau, his dossier 86/0/96 [April 22, 1998]... Annex 161. A note on the existence of a SNUFF network of which Mr. | ||
 Pictures of Etienne Davignon and Maurice Lippens at Bilderberg, superimposed on extracts (and a picture) from the X-Dossiers. | GLATZ of the CIDE would have had knowledge and in which one would find a certain François LIPPENS, who is close to the mayor of Knokke, whose name is often mentioned in very horrible activities. I conducted no verification or crosscheck." (186) Etienne Davignon is another person whose name comes up in the X-Dossier, although he has not been implicated to the extent of the Lippens family. X2, the police officer, apparently was the only one to mention him: "Parties with underage girls in the Cromwel hotel in Knokke. Present: Delvoie - Karel - X2 - Lippens - Van Gheluwe - Etienne Davignon. The girls knew where to go and with whom. Lippens hits the little girls. Several meetings between | |
| Karel and Davignon in the Memling hotel with the two Lippens." (187) X2 speaks of two Karels in her testimony. The first one is a high official in a Brussels court, whose mistress she was. The other one is Dr. Karel van Miert (188), who briefly appeared in the (business families) table above. Karel is a well known Socialist politician from Flanders. His biography includes: | ||
- Member of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1985 and from 1989 to 1994.
- Went to Bilderberg in 1993.
- Member of the Brussels Freemasonry lodge Erasmus and a member of the Grand Lodge of Belgium.
- President of Nyenrode Business University from 2000 to 2003.
- Formerly an advisor to the Rabobank, one of the largest banks in the Netherlands.
- Joined the board of Anglo-American Corporation in 2002, and is a member of the Audit and Nomination Committees.
- Succeeded Etienne Davignon as a director of Solvay in 2003.
- Member of the Advisory Board of La Maison de l'Europe of Bibliothèque Solvay.
- Member of the supervisory boards of German utility giant RWE, Philips NV, Munich Re and Vivendi Universal.
- Member of the advisory boards of Goldman Sachs, Eli Lilly, and Agfa-Gevaert.
- Director of Carrefour Belgium and Wolters Kluwer (large Dutch publisher).
- Director of De Persgroep (The Press Group), a media corporation that owns newspapers and news magazines like Het Laatste Nieuws, De Morgen (ironic, as this paper exposed the whole X-Dossiers), De Tijd and Het Parool. It owns about 30-40 percent of the magazines on the market in Flanders (Dutch-language Belgium).
Who else in the table above is mentioned in the X-Dossiers? Take the de Merode family, for instance. Prince Alexandre de Merode was mentioned by both Nathalie W. (189) and X4 (190) as a central player in the Satanic aspect of the child abuse and -murder network. Additionally, X2, who was spared the worst abuse, mentioned having been in the presence of the "Merode brothers" (apparently Prince Baudouin de Merode, a Knight of Malta, and his younger brother Lionel) together with a whole bunch of the worst aristocratic abusers (191). We will get back to this family.
Charles De Selliers De Moranville, apparently a lawyer in Brussels, appears in a document of the X-Dossiers, although what exactly he has been accused of is not clear. The following text could be found in the summary of PV 103.204/97:
"While doing work at Rue de Neufchâtel 62 in St. Gilles [Brussels; only a few blocks away from Charles' office] the witness noticed the existence of an almost finished subterranean bunker (in 01/96). A tunnel was concealed behind one of the walls. He was surprised by a conversation in which a lady said "the children will be well here."
Because of the background of this family, its connections to alleged abusers, and a rumor going around the net that Charles has been accused on another occasion (192), it has been included in this article. Charles' name appears in a column that lists the accused mixed in with a few victims. Charles doesn't seem to have the background of a victim, as members of De Selliers De Moranville family can be found in the Jesuits, Cercle de Lorraine, Banque Privée Edmond de Rothschild in Genève, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Fortis, Solvay, and Coca-Cola Belgium.
Did you already notice how Solvay seems to come up a lot? Etienne Davignon, Karel van Miert and Guy De Selliers De Moranville were all directors of this company. But there's more. The Boëls and Janssens, both major shareholders in Solvay, were accused of trade in drugs and children in 1999, aside from the X-Dossiers (193). Francoise Dehaye, whose husband was named by X2 as being part of the abuse network (194), is a quality and innovation manager at Solvay. The gamekeeper and-or woodsman of La Hulpe, the castle of the Solvay family, has been accused of being a violent child abuser (195). And how about the strange statements about Chateau des Amerois, owned by the Solvay family, which also appeared in the Dutroux dossier? (196)
The Belgian royal family has been implicated on several occasions. X2 spoke about a girl she had known who had been murdered, and how this girl told her about the domain of Princess Liliane de Rety ("a madwoman") where children were buried (197). Liliane was the second wife of King Leopold III (d. 1983) and lived until her death in 2002 at Chateau d'Argenteuil. In 2004, the Delwart family, shareholders of Solvay, bought the domain (198).
From personal experience, X2 mentioned having seen Prince Laurent, the brother of Belgium's present crown prince. Laurent apparently was more interested in masturbating at child abuse orgies than taking part in the actual abuse (199).
X3 implicated Prince Charles (1903-1983), the second son of King Albert I; King Baudouin (1930-1993), the eldest son of King Leopold III; and either King Albert I or II. Unfortunately, X3 spoke about experiences from the 1950s and early 1960s, which meant that none of the other X-Dossier witnesses could confirm aspects of her story. Two of her primary abusers, Paul Vanden Boeynants and Charly De Pauw, had already appeared in the Pinon file of the early 1980s; the same is true for King Albert II (200). Additionally, part of the details of the abuse described by X3, although recognizable, can be a bit hard swallow (the scale and setting), all making her testimony hard to use without more backup from other witnesses. In X3's support, however, she was a well-respected person in the support community for abused women and children, and her interviewers refused to write down most of what she said. A few excerpts from a summary written about X3's testimonies:
"The car stopped on a parterre before the house. [It] was surrounded by a park. Two supervisors were present: Ralf and Walter. The children were taken to a tower made of natural stone and with a wooden door... an underground [corridor] left from the turret toward the cellars... without light... going downward. In the cellars there were cells where the children were locked up, awaiting their turn. There also were some cells for the dogs (dobermans). The passageway gave way to a room of spectacle. In the tower: dead children's bodies in various stages of decomposition (sometimes dismembered and/or missing body parts) and carcasses of dogs. Spectators: always the same but difficult to identify - about fifty. She recognized the regent Charles, King Baudouin and King Albert, and two others that she calls Charly [De Pauw] and Polo [Paul Vanden Boeynants]. She thinks to have recognized Willy Claes [later NATO secretary general] and doctor Vanden Eynde. The dogs listen to Ralf and Walter. The addicted dogs are excited. Spectacles = orgies, putting to death children and dogs. The spectacle room has a strong odor of excrements of dogs. Dogs can roam free in the garden... Gilles (12 years old??) was castrated by Polo. The other children have to drink the blood... Girls are slashed with razor blades. The lips of the vagina of X3 have partially been cut and were given to eat to the dogs... A girl's [large] vulva was cut into slices and fed to the dogs..."
"Childbirth by a teenager through a caesarean section. Baby pulled out of the stomach and given to the dogs by Polo. She saw the dismembered mother again in the exposition of the dead... She has to eat the human flesh cut from the bodies. She has to eat pieces of children (fingers) served in gelatin. Good taste - slightly sugary. It provoked an enormous sensation of hunger and thirst. Drinking blood relieved the sensation of thirst... She speaks of another murder that she committed on a girl of 3-5 years under the threat that it would be her brother who would be killed. She opened up the girl from the vagina to the breastbone with a knife. She gave the internal organs to the dog. Someone cut off the head. The child was devoured by the dogs... Murder of a young teenage woman who was opened up by Vanden Eynde... The baby shouted in the mother's stomach. She resewed the stomach with the baby inside..."
"Luxurious house with a surrounding wall and gate... non illuminated twisting path. There were some stables. Parterre with flowers. Hall of entry = cream-colored and blue tiles - red carpeting. Walls made of marble with a teenage picture of [later king] Baudouin on it. She spent a whole night with Baudouin - fellatio and sodomy. Presence of maid... In this house there were many servants... She remembers one evening when she had been smeared with cream before being brought to the table on a tray. She had been licked off and raped... At the end of another evening a child... had been castrated. The other children that were present buried the boy in a flowerbed. She remembers a child who had been decapitated, then cut and fried before being eaten. She remembers children who hung on hooks in the kitchen. A certain Solange [a female name] has been enucleated [what exactly?] with a spoon by her and an old lady." (201)
Besides the X-Dossier accusations there have at least been two other instances in which high-level members of Belgium society have been accused of doing terrible things with children.
By far the most prominent occasion was in May 2004 by The Sprout, an English-language magazine located in Brussels that reports on EU affairs. They wrote an article claiming that Julie and Melissa had been killed in a snuff movie and that a number of prominent people had been present at this murder. However, even though plenty of questions remain about the kidnapping and murder of Julie and Melissa, the evidence the Sprout came up with, in the opinion of this author, was not very strong and their idea of posting pictures of the bodies of Julie and Melissa on the magazine's cover was highly questionable, even if these bodies were to show that the girls had not simply died from starvation. Again in the opinion of this author, the pictures do not show a whole lot, and neither do other pictures that can be found in the (final) Dutroux dossier.
The other case happened in 1999 and centered around the person of Count Yann de Meeus d'Argenteuil. This count came from an influential family who were (and possibly are) significant shareholders in Societe Generale. In fact, Count Ferdinand de Meeus (1798-1861), "the Rothschild of Belgium", became governor of Societe Generale in 1830 and helped King Leopold to acquire control over the bank from the Princes of Orange.
Count Yann's biography is less prestigious than the average member of this family and is characterized by pedophilia and psychotherapy. On September 12, 1999, while locked away in a mental institution, unsuccessfully trying to get out, Count Yann drew up a list of personalities he accused of being involved in the trafficking of children and drugs. He sent this list to investigating agencies in Belgium, France and the United States, but apparently nothing was done. On November 11, 2000, Count Yann committed suicide. (202)
At first glance the list doesn't seem very interesting, because none of the names match those that appeared in the X-Dossiers. However, it must be stated that there are a huge amount of private and business links between the men on Count Yann's list and those in the X-Dossiers.
- Take members of the Lambert, Boël, Janssen and de Launoit families which appear on Count Yann's list. They share boards, private clubs and foundations with Davignon, the Lippens and De Selliers De Moranville families. The Boëls have been to the European Round Table, the Janssens to Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission, the CFR, the Atlantic Institute if International Affairs, the Royal Institute for International Relations, etc. Particularly chilling is the involvement of the Lippens, de Launoit and Selliers De Moranville families in the Belgian Kids Foundation for Pediatric Research. (203)
- Take Philippe de Patoul, who worked at Banque Lambert (GBL, where many of the accused reside) and in 1995 set up the TNN Trust & Management Ltd. with Bernard de Merode. Bernard de Merode married the sister of Baron de Bonvoisin (204), one of the abusers in the testimonies of X1 and X2, and now works at Risk Analysis, a firm headed by two retired but formerly very senior MI5 agents (205). Bernard's family, as already stated, features quite prominently in the X-Dossiers also.
- Take examining magistrate Benoit Dejemeppe, who was a protege of Melchior Wathelet, who in turn was a protege of Paul Vanden Boeynants, both allegedly extremely violent child abusers. Dejemeppe is quite a controversial judge who in 1996 tried to separate Annie Bouty's dossier from the Dutroux child abuse dossier through Georges Marnette (206). It must also be stated, however, that Dejemeppe was responsible for locking up Count Yann.
- Take magistrate Yves de Prelle de la Nieppe, who's a member of a rather small club named Carnet Mondain. Other members of the club are Charles de Selliers de Moranville and wife (accused of involvement in the child abuse network), Jacques G. Jonet (accused of covering up the Pinon Affair; once Otto von Habsburg's political secretary; through his involvement with Mouvement d'Action pour l'Unite Europeenne he came at CEPIC and de Bonvoisin's PDG headquarters), Baron Guibert de Viron (a family member is accused of trafficking drugs and children, and is married into the de Caters family which has been accused in the X-Dossiers), and Countess Rodolphe d'Ursel (a family member is accused of being part of the abuse and snuff network of Baron de Bonvoisin, to whom this family is close). (207)
- Take Axel Vervoordt, a well known art dealer and alleged pedophile (208) whose art castle is located next to a domain where X1 said child murders took place (209); or Prince Alexandre of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the stepson of the earlier mentioned Princess Liliane de Rethy; or Chevalier Pierre Bauchau, the former president and chairman of the African Banque Belgolaise, majority owned by the Fortis Bank of such figures as Maurice Lippens, Etienne Davignon, Baron Daniel Janssen and Guy de Selliers de Moranville.
To summarize this part of the article: as for the families described above, by far the most convincing evidence has been gathered against the Lippens family, of which three members have been accused by about half a dozen witnesses of the same type of extreme abuse. Evidence against the Princes of Merode has also been stacking up. Besides testimonies from X4, Nathalie W. and supplementary information from X2, it's also telling that the de Merode family is intermarried with de Bonvoisins, a very notorious family on which we still need to focus. Who places trust in the testimony of X2 will additionally hold serious suspicions against such individuals as Etienne Davignon, Karel van Miert and Princess Liliane de Rethy (or the whole royal family). As for the De Selliers De Moranville family, there remains a lack of detail in the accusations against them. The same goes for the Solvay family, in which case we're talking about circumstantial evidence anyway, albeit quite a lot. And last and certainly least, the accusations of Count Yann de Meeus d'Argenteuil; they might have been interesting and insightful to this author to identify Belgium's aristocracy, but there's no denying that without additional research they remain quite unreliable.
The accused in (private) intelligence and politics
Two of the most prominent names in the X-Dossiers are Paul Vanden Boeynants and Baron Benoit de Bonvoisin.
Vanden Boeynants was accused by X1, X3 and X4 of being a violent child abuser and-or a person involved in hunts on children (210). Nathalie W. claimed to have seen Vanden Boeynants at the Dolo (211), the favorite club of Nihoul, while X2 testified she had seen Vanden Boeynants' private driver there, Henri Bil, talking to one of Belgium's most notorious gangsters, Madani Bouhouche (212). X1 has named both Bil and Bouhouche as child abusers (213). On a lesser note, Vanden Boeynants' name also appeared in the Pinon file of the 1980s (214) and in Maud Sarr's tv testimony in February 1990 (215), in which his name came up alongside a DEA-trained gendarme general with whom he once ran a massive drug importing operation (216). Both the Pinon and Maud Sarr cases were about a prostitution network in which minors were used to blackmail high officials.
| X1 and X2 mentioned de Bonvoisin as one of the most sadistic abusers in the network (217). One of his sisters married Count Herve d'Ursel (218), who has been accused by X1 of | ||
 1986, Paul Vanden Boeynants (left) and Baron de Bonvoisin (right), the two pillars of fascist subversion in Belgium in the 1970s and 1980s. Both have been accused of child abuse, -torture and -murder. The driver and confidante of Vanden Boeynants, who also stands accused, stated that he "understood" that Nihoul was the "right hand" of de Bonvoisin (PV 39.027). Nihoul certainly knew Vanden Boeynants and was very active in the political party "VdB" and "BdB" ran, the PSC with its fascist CEPIC think tank. | involvement in the snuff and ritual abuse network (219). His other sister is married to the earlier mentioned Bernard de Merode, an intelligence-connected family which has been accused of child abuse and Satanism by X4 and Nathalie W. (220) X2 mentioned having been at a meeting organized by her pimp, at which de Merode, d'Ursel and de Bonvoisin families were all present, together with the Prince and Princess of Chimay (221). According to X2, hunts on children were organized in the woods of Chateau de Chimay (222). It might come as a surprise, but Belgium has a rather rich conspiracy history. In the past 20 years, a lot of pages have been devoted to reports of high level involvement in the planning of coups, false flag operations, prostitution networks, pedophilia and drug dealing. Officially, all the individual scandals had nothing to do with each other and above all, had nothing to do with a fascist underground. In reality, this fascist underground is key to understanding the full version of events. A good way to start this story is with the politician Paul Vanden Boeynants, who represented the Parti Social | |
| Chretien (PSC) in Parliament from 1949 to 1979. In 1961, Vanden Boeynants became chairman of the PSC, and from 1966 to 1968 he was prime minister of Belgium. From 1972 to 1978, he was defense minister of Belgium, followed in 1979 with another brief stint as prime minister. | ||
There was nothing "social" about Vanden Boeynants' ideas, however. While being educated by the Jesuits in the 1930s, he became a prominent follower of Leon Degrelle, head of the fascist Rex party. Although he didn't join the collaboration during World War II, Vanden Boeynants did seek contact with the Flemish-nationalists in the late 1940s, at the time still a movement that was heavily persecuted for having worked with the Nazis. In 1949, Vanden Boeynants, together with the intelligence-connected, pro-colonialist journalist Jo Gerard, set up the Committee for the Revival of the PSC, which turned out to be successful: Vanden Boeynants and Gerard became top players in the new PSC party. At the same time that these two men revived the PSC, they also ran a Red-scare campaign, mirroring the one of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the US. In 1955, Vanden Boeynants set up a think tank within the PSC to neutralize its labor union wing. Around this time, he met up with the intelligence-connected aristocrat Baron Benoit de Bonvoisin, who also became active in the PSC.
Over the next several decades Paul Vanden Boeynants and Baron de Bonvoisin became pillars of the fascist underground in Belgium. The organizations they founded were later named as having played a key role in the effort to destabilize Belgium, the objective being to bring in a stronger government that more effectively could counter the "KGB subversion" of labor unions and left-wing political parties. These operations were planned since at least 1972 (223) and continued until at least the mid 1980s. A brief timeline follows:
- In 1969, Vanden Boeynants set up Cercle des Nations with a number of his political allies, including Baron de Bonvoisin and Paul Vankerkhoven (secretary-general of Otto von Habsburg's and Alfredo Sanchez Bella's CEDI; founder of the Belgian branch of the WACL, also in 1969). Cercle des Nations was a private, aristocratic club, which started out with about 80 members who generally were royalist, staunchly anti-communist, pro-Nato, pro-European integration and highly fascist. Examples of the Cercle's fascist tendencies include the April 1970 reception in honor of the fascist colonels that ruled Greece, the January 1976 celebration of the 10th anniversary of Papa Doc's Haitian dictatorship, and its magazine's continuous support for the apartheid in Africa, and the dictatorships of Pinochet, Franco and Salazar. The Cercle has been tied to organized crime and more than a few of its most prominent members have been accused of child abuse and child murder. Think, for instance, of Baron de Bonvoisin, Paul Vanden Boeynants, Jean-Paul Dumont, Count Herve d'Ursel, Roger Boas, Charly De Pauw, Guy Mathot, Ado Blaton, General Rene Bats, Philippe Cryns and the de Merode family. (224)
- In 1971, Paul Vanden Boeynants, with funding from Baron de Bonvoisin, set up Nouvel Europe Magazine (NEM). Around this magazine a number of NEM-Clubs were organized where fascist militants could meet each other.
- In 1972, Vanden Boeynants and de Bonvoisin founded CEPIC, a clandestine think tank which represented a renewed effort to neutralize the leftists elements within their PSC party. Vankerkhoven once again was one of the co-founders.
- In 1973, the fascists of the NEM clubs founded their own militant paramilitary group: Front de la Jeunesse (FJ). Francis Dossogne, a paid advisor of Baron de Bonvoisin, was appointed head of FJ.
- The Public Information Office (PIO), a joint private-military intelligence group headed by Major Jean-Marie Bougerol, was founded in 1974. Bougerol was a member of SDRA8 -the heart of the Belgian stay-behind network- which specialized in combat and sabotage, parachute jumping and maritime operations. He gave orders to the head of Front de la Jeunesse, Francis Dossogne. Vanden Boeynants and Baron de Bonvoisin had been responsible for Bougerol's appointment and they could often be found at PIO headquarters. To show how fascist he really was, Bougerol travelled with CEPIC director Bernard Mercier to Spain in 1975 to attend the funeral of Franco. (225)
- In 1977, PIO recruited Paul Latinus (226), a Nazi who in turn had been recruited by the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 1967 and had later been trained by NATO (227). His career was boosted by letters of recommendation of several CEPIC directors (228). In 1978, Latinus became a member of the Front de la Jeunesse and in 1981, after the activities of the Front were exposed, he was given permission by Dossogne to create yet another Nazi militia: the Westland New Post. WNP's head of security became the fascist murderer Marcel Barbier (229), a Wackenhut employee (230).
A section within Front de la Jeunesse was named Group G, and consisted solely of gendarmerie officers. Reported members of this group were Paul Latinus (Nazi; recruited by the DIA in 1967, age 17; trained by NATO; reserve lieutenant with the Air Force; paid informant of State Security; recruited as an intelligence agent by PIO in 1977; recommended everywhere by the CEPIC leadership; member Front de la Jeunesse; founder Westland New Post (WNP) in 1981; named as one of the leaders of Group G; suicided in 1984), commandant Leon Francois (invited by the US Army's CID in 1969; educated by the DEA; received by President Nixon; secretary of the International Drug Enforcement Association; founded the gendarmerie's National Bureau for Drugs (NBD) in the 1972-1975 period with Paul "VdB" Vanden Boeynants and CIA support, and became the NBD's initial head; always present at the border when a new large shipment of marihuana and cocaine of VdB's company was smuggled into Belgium; leading member of the subversive and fascist Group G, together with DEA agent Frank Eaton; provided the CIA chief in Belgium with intelligence about leftists and other dissident groups; accused in 1990 by prostitute Maud Sarr of involvement in orgies with minors, together with Paul Vanden Boeynants and Jean Depretre (both accused by other sources as well); one of his successors at the NBD, general Beaurir was also accused of pedophilia and was also part of the CEPIC circle), DEA agent Frank Eaton (his friend, pilot and DEA agent Jean-Francois Buslik, was tied with his friend Madani Bouhouche to a number of assassinations), Martial Lekeu, Bernard Devillet (former gendarme officer and friend of Lekeu; judicial police officer; protected by Reyniers, Marnette and Dejemeppe as soon as he was questioned about his involvement in Group G) and Didier Mievis (BOB officer who recruited for Dossogne's Front de la Jeunesse; present at the FJ training camps). Group G was part of wider operation to infiltrate and subvert the Belgian state. Similar compartmented cells were located in the Army, the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), the Royal Military School, the Mobile Legion, the Special Intervention Squadron (Diana Group), the narcotics section of the BOB and different other branches of the Gendarmerie. There's very little information available about all these groups. (231) In addition to its efforts to infiltrate law enforcement and the military, Front de la Jeunesses also organized training camps in the Ardennes. Fascists like Jean-Francis Calmette (joined the terrorist OAS, which tried to assassinate de Gaulle and destabilize Algeria; self-defense instructor of Diana Group recruits; director of Wackenhut Belgium until 1981; head of security of the annual ball of the PSC in 1980, headed by Paul Vanden Boeynants at the time; member of Westland New Post), the later local Wackenhut director who also recruited Barbier, were instructors at these camps.
The fascist network that Vanden Boeynants, de Bonvoisin and their associates had carefully built up had to absorb a severe blow in May 1981 when excerpts of a confidential State Security memo were published by De Morgen. The memo explained the role of CEPIC, and more specifically Baron de Bonvoisin and Jean Bougerol, in cultivating a fascist underground in Belgium.
CONFIDENTIAL Amongst others, it concerns: Jean Breydel, secretary-general of the C.E.P.I.C., Benoit de Bonvoisin, treasurer of the C.E.P.I.C., Joseph (Jo) Gerard, Paul Van Kerkhoven, Joseph Franz and Bernard Mercier [PEHI note: the most prominent, Paul Vanden Boeynants, has been left out]. The board, the administration and the editorial office of the NEM, which has been published under this name since 1971 by the "Compagnie Internationale des Editions Populaires" (C.I.D.E.P.), is located at no. 5 of the Dekenstraat in Brussels... Furthermore, at this address was located the secretariat of the 1972 founded NEM-clubs, as well, until 1978, the seat of F.J.... The seat of C.E.P.I.C. is located at no. 39 of the Belliardstraat in Brussels. This building also contains the Belliard auditorium, the seat of "Mouvement d'Action pour l'Unite Europeenne" (xx), just as the offices of the "Societe de Promotion et de la Distribution Generale" (P.D.G.), supervised, through a go-between, by Benoit de Bonvoisin... The NEM is supported by Benoit de Bonvoisin, who pays the rent of the in the Dekensstraat located offices and hires the editor in chief as an advisor... Francis Dossogne, head of the F.J., was paid in the same way, until he left the NEM. The partnership P.D.G., and consequently de Bonvoisin, through a go-between finances the magazine "INFOREP" which claims to be a "daily paper for party leaders", but in reality is a bi-language magazine with strong anti-communist leanings. From 1976 to 1978 its editor in chief was Major Jean Bougerol, a higher career officer working for the headquarters of the domestic armed forces [PEHI note: not to mention, head of PIO]. Jean Bougerol has spoken at lectures organized by the NEM-clubs... This officer, who keeps in close contact with Bernard Mercier, board member of the C.E.P.I.C., was mentioned as one of the organizers of the transport from Antwerp to the seat of the C.E.P.I.C. in Brussels of a wanted neo-nazi terrorist. This person had to be taken by Bernard Mercier to a domain in the Ardennes belonging to de Bonvoisin and subsequently to France. The German was intercepted by State Security during the trip from Antwerp to Brussels... According to unverifiable sources the F.J. would have approached several foreign governments and opposition-movements for financial support." (232) |
Although the publishing of this memo ended the public career of Baron de Bonvoisin and resulted in the disbanding of CEPIC, the underground network of fascists remained operational. It would be tied to the violent Gang of Nijvel robberies from 1982 to 1985 and the Cellules Communistes Combattantes (CCC) bombings in 1984 and 1985. Several men from this fascist network would give a few hints about how their clandestine operation was used by unknown higher ups, at least one of them being US intelligence.
"Around 1981, Paul Latinus testified more than once that he worked for the American intelligence services. Also his assistant, Marcel Barbier, claimed to work for an international organization of which he never wanted to give the name... On top of that, Paul Latinus testified in 1983 that his organization, the WNP, to which Libert, Barbier and others belonged, worked for an unnamed allied power and countered the Soviet infiltration in Belgium." (233)
WNP member Michel Libert stated:
"One received orders. We can go back to, say, 1982. From 1982 to 1985. There were projects."
"'[I was told:] You, Mr. Libert, know nothing about why we're doing this. Nothing at all. All we ask is that your group, with cover from the gendarmerie, with cover from Security, carry out a job. Target: The supermarkets. Where are they? What kind of locks are there? What sort of protection do they have that could interfere with our operations? Does the store manager lock up? Or do they use an outside security company?'"
"We carried out the orders and sent in our reports: Hours of opening and closing. Everything you want to know about a supermarket. What was this for? This was one amongst hundreds of missions." [clearly hints to the Gang of Nijvel] (234)
Martial Lekeu was another person who gave certain details. He had been one of the earliest members of Group G and was a good friend of commandant Leon Francois and Paul Latinus. He gave his information in 1985 after having fled to the United States.
"When I joined the Gendarmerie I became a devout fascist. At the Diana Group I got to know people who had the same convictions as me. We greeted each other like the Nazis..."
"During the gatherings of the Front a plan was developed to destabilize Belgium and to prepare it for a non-democratic regime. This plan consisted of two parts: a cell political terrorism and a cell gangsterism. I worked in the cell gangsterism. I was one of the specialist who had to train young guys with rightist leanings, to knead them into a well trained gang prepared to do anything. After that I had to break all contact with them, so they could exist as an independent group and do robberies without them realizing they were part of a well-planned plot..."
"They'd have two plans. The first one was to organise gangs to do hold up of hostage, you
know, killing; the second one was to organise the so called "Left movement" who
will do a terrorist attempt just to make believe, make the population believe that
these terrorist attempts were done by the Left." (235)
Like Libert, Lekeu strongly hinted to the fascist underground's involvement in the Gang of Nijvel affair, a series of violent robberies which occurred from December 1982 to November 1985. Coincidentally, during some of these robberies a number of individuals were killed that not too long before had belonged to CEPIC, had informed persons about a plan to subvert the state, or had been tied to sex parties, possibly with minors (236). Although never prosecuted, the person who was the most severely implicated in this affair was the fascist Jean Bultot.
Against the advice of State Security, Bultot had been appointed assistant director of the Sint-Gillis prison in Brussels. He acted as a liaison between several Nazi inmates and Belgian's fascist underground, for which he allegedly did some recruiting. Among his friends were Francis Dossogne, head of Front de la Jeunesse, and Jean-Paul "Pepe" Derijcke, the owner of the fascist Jonathan club, which was frequented by such men as Madani Bouhouche and Jean-Francis Calmette. Coincidentally, Derijcke was an associate of Jean-Michel Nihoul. They also had the same hobby: blackmailing people.
As for Bultot having been implicated in the Gang of Nijvel affair; when a stolen, burned out car belonging to the Gang of Nijvel was found on the side of the road, detectives also found a charred piece of paper with handwriting of Bultot's girlfriend, Claudine Falkenberg. At that time, Falkenburg worked at the ministry of Cecile Goor, a former member of the by then disbanded CEPIC. The piece of paper was a fragment of a February 1984 speech that Bultot had given at the Triton club during a shooting competition he had organized. This event had been patroned by Cecile Goor, secretary of state Pierre Mainil (also of CEPIC) and the Cultural Department of the US Embassy in Brussels. In that same month, also at the Triton, Bultot had given a demonstration to civil servants, law enforcement officers and intelligence agents about the use of kevlar in car doors. Coincidentally, traces of kevlar were found in the car doors of the burned out Gang of Nijvel car. These leads were never pursued. (237)
During a house search at Bultot's girlfriend inspectors found the telephone number of doctor Pinon in her address book. Nobody knows for sure what it did there, but it does seem as if over time the Pinon dossier has become a corrupted blackmail dossier for de Bonvoisin and his fascist friends (238). After Bultot had fled to Paraguay in 1986, in the aftermath of the murder on Juan Mendez (by Bouhouche), he decided to sing. The first thing he claimed was that the rumors of high level involvement in the Gang of Nijvel affair and a subsequent cover up were true. Then the disinformation came: State Security (the enemy of de Bonvoisin and Bultot) was behind it. Bultot went on to advise examining magistrate Freddy Troch to reopen the Pinon affair. One thing is for sure, a lot of politicians and magistrates would not have appreciated that.
A piece of evidence in the Gang of Nijvel case that is not directly linked to Bultot, is that the ammunition the robbers used was unique to the Special Intervention Squadron (Diana Group). Additionally, in one of the robberies the gang members used a tactic only seen in special police forces like Belgium's Diana Group, a fact which might result in flashbacks to Front de la Jeunesse and its Group G branch.
But wasn't the Front disbanded in 1981 after the memo of State Security? Well, it was, but it is known that Westland New Post, under the leadership of Latinus remained in existence until 1984. And like Dossogne, Latinus took orders from Jean Bougerol and his PIO intelligence group, if not the DIA directly (239).
Like Front de la Jeunesse, PIO was officially disbanded in 1981. However, Bougerol and his group did not disappear. PIO was reorganized into a completely private entity and changed its name to the European Institute of Management (EIM). Bougerol was followed up by none other than long-time ambassador Douglas MacArthur II (240), a nephew of the famous general and by this time a very close friend and business associate of Sun Myung Moon (241). Like PIO had controlled Front de la Jeunesse, so EIM remained in control of Latinus' Westland New Post and likely several other aspects of the fascist underground. Marcel Barbier, head of security of WNP, joined EIM (242). Just as interesting, gendarme colonel Rene Mayerus became administrative-director of EIM (243). Mayerus had been a co-founder of the Special Intervention Squadron (Diana Group), and was a close acquaintance of Jean Bougerol, not to mention WNP members Bouhouche and Wackenhut director Calmette (244). He referred people looking for a security expert to WNP head Paul Latinus (245). After his retirement Mayerus was suspected of having spied on the BOB in Brussels for EIM and to have recruited Bougerol into EIM (246).
If this isn't enough to get someone at least interested in the links between the gendarmerie, the fascist underground, PIO-EIM and the Gang of Nijvel, then also consider that 11 months before the first Gang of Nijvel robbery, Bouhouche had been totally implicated (but not prosecuted) in a break in at the Diana Group in which two dozen of the newest rifles and pistols were stolen. Bouhouche and Bultot knew each other well at the time, as they both were prominent members of the Belgian Practical Shooting Association; some of the shooting events they organized included the theme 'warehouse panic'. (247)
As you can see, it's not really a surprise that Bultot and Bouhouche have always been primary suspects of alternative researchers of having been Gang of Nijvel members. The official investigators, in the first few years examining magistrate Jean Depretre and his sidekick Commandant Duterme, concluded that there were no links to a fascist underground. But what authority do their claims really have? Depretre had already been accused of covering up the Montaricourt-Israel case and soon thereafter of drawing unnecessary attention to the Pinon dossier (248). In 1996, X2 accused him of having been part of the child abuse network (249). Maud Sarr had already mentioned his name in 1990 (250). Commandant Duterme has now become notorious for having played a key role in covering up the X-Dossiers.
Baron Benoit de Bonvoisin's father, Pierre, visited the first Bilderberg conference,
along with Paul van Zeeland. A regular line indicates interaction, an arrow at the
end significant top-down influence.
By now it should be obvious that the CEPIC leadership played a key role in the whole effort to subvert the Belgian state. Not surprisingly, directors of CEPIC not only interacted a lot with PIO and the fascist underground, they also had numerous ties to foreign intelligence.
CEPIC director Jo Gerard, who had revived the PSC with Vanden Boeynants after WWII, had designed an assassination plot against Lumumba, soon after Congo had been granted independence from Belgium. His plan was canceled after it was decided that the CIA should take over. (251)
CEPIC director Paul Vankerkhoven had set up the Belgian branch of the World Anti-Communist League (the Ligue Internationale de la Liberte) and because of that was in close contact with the CIA, DIA, the NATO stay-behind network and the Moonies of Sun Myung Moon. In addition to his co-founding of Cercle des Nations and l'Institut Europeen de Developpement, he also was secretary-general of Otto von Habsburg's CEDI, making him a major player in the intelligence-ridden Vatican-Paneuropa network. (252)
CEPIC director Bernard Mercier had numerous intelligence connections. In Brussels he provided the WNP with a flat to house militants and sensitive dossiers. Mercier was a good friend of PIO head major Jean Bougerol. In 1975, they together had been to the funeral of Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain. Mercier also regularly met in Brussels with several "members of foreign intelligence agencies", and like Vankerkhoven, he is known to have been in contact with Belgian representatives of Aginter Press, the Portuguese stay-behind network set up and controlled by the CIA (253). Aginter Press had been founded by Yves Guérin-Sérac, a close associate of Otto Skorzeny and Stefano Delle Chiaie, two major players in the fascist underground of Europe. Serac had been one of the founders of the terrorist OAS, which had tried to assassinate De Gaulle and prevent the independence of Algeria (remember Calmette of FJ, WNP and Wackenhut, who had begun his career in the OAS?).
In May 1974, a number of documents had been retrieved from a hastily-abandoned Aginter Press headquarters. On one of these documents a text could be found which is perfectly in line with the words of Martial Lekeu and Michel Libert, not to mention numerous other statements from individuals once connected to the fascist "stay-behind" networks.
"In the first phase of our political activity we must create chaos in all structures of the regime. Two forms of terrorism can provoke such a situation: blind terrorism (committing massacres indiscriminately which cause a large number of victims), and selective terrorism (eliminate chosen persons). This destruction of the state must be carried out as much as possible under the cover of 'communist activities.' After that, we must intervene at the heart of the military, the juridical power and the church, in order to influence popular opinion, suggest a solution, and clearly demonstrate the weakness of the present legal apparatus... Popular opinion must be polarized in such a way, that we are being presented as the only instrument capable of saving the nation. It is obvious that we will need considerable financial resources to carry out such operations." (254)
CEPIC founder and treasurer Baron de Bonvoisin also had his share of intelligence connections. As mentioned, Francis Dossogne and his Front de la Jeunesse were completely dependent on his money. In late 1975 or early 1976, de Bonvoisin hosted a meeting at his castle where leading fascist militants from Belgium, Italy, France, Britain and Spain met with each other (255). Like Mercier and Vanden Boeynants, de Bonvoisin could regularly be found at PIO headquarters. Also, his good friend and security consultant André Moyen, who supported his campaign against the X-Dossiers, used to be an important player in the stay-behind network (256). De Bonvoisin has not only stated that he worked with US intelligence, Paul Vanden Boeynants and major Jean Bougerol's superior (General Roman) in countering Soviet subversion, but also that his US friends were largely responsible for getting his arch enemy, the anti-fascist head of State Security, to resign.
"Besides his political role within the CEPIC, Benoît de Bonvoisin exerted an influence in Zaïre [Congo; Belgian colony until 1960], firstly in the struggle against communism and secondly attempting to curb corruption, with friends from the American administration. Van den Boeynants assigned General Roman and Benoît on a number of missions in order to counteract the Soviet influence in Belgium... Through a number of people with whom he was in touch in the United States and France, B. de B felt it necessary to try and get the Belgian intelligence services under democratic control. He considered it urgent, since this was the only secret service to escape control... [bashes Albert Raes, head of Belgian intelligence] Largely because of B. de B, Raes was forced to resign in 1990... B. de Bonvoisin was highly regarded by the head of the French secret services, Alexandre de Marenches, but the latter had no esteem for Albert Raes... [bashes Albert Raes a bit more]... he [Raes] tried to associate B. de B with the extreme right, a trick often used by the Soviet secret services... Professor Lode Van Outrive concluded that: 'Several times the Americans tried to convince Raes to concentrate first and foremost on the Eastern block countries whereas he seemed more interested in targeting extreme right wing movements. This clearly bothered the Americans who got him to resign.'" (257)
There are numerous links between Belgium's fascist underground and intelligence. The following table has been created to summarize these links. More information can be found in 'the accused' appendix.
| Name | In Belgium | Foreign |
| Marcel Barbier | WNP; EIM | Wackenhut; NATO |
| Baron de Bonvoisin | CEPIC; FJ; PIO; Belgian special forces | With US intelligence in Congo and other places |
| Major Jean Bougerol | SDRA8; PIO; EIM | NATO |
| Jean-Francois Buslik | Involved with fascist underground and Group G | DEA |
| Jean-Francis Calmette | FJ; WNP | OAS; Belgian director of Wackenhut |
| Claude Dery | SDRA8; PIO; involved with fascists and templar orders | NATO |
| Frank Eaton | Group G | DEA |
| Cmd. Leon Francois | Group G | US Army; DEA |
| Jacques Jonet | MAUE; Pinon affair | Aginter Press; Habsburg network |
| Eric Lammers | WNP; caught with child pornography on his PC | Wackenhut |
| Paul Latinus | PIO; FJ; WNP | DIA; NATO |
| Emile Lecerf | head of NEM; organizer of fascist meetings with de Bonvoisin | Vankerkhoven's advisor at the WACL |
| Douglas MacArthur II | EIM; Banque Lambert | NATO (SHAPE and SHAEF); State Department; CFR; Moonies |
| Col. Rene Mayerus | Diana Group; EIM under MacArthur II | EIM under MacArthur II |
| Bernard Mercier | CEPIC; WNP | Aginter Press; Franco's regime; regularly met in Brussels with "several members of foreign intelligence agencies" |
| Andre Moyen | NATO stay-behind; good friend of de Bonvoisin | NATO stay-behind |
| Paul Vanden Boeynants | CEPIC | Associate of Adnan Khashoggi in the 1970s and 1980s (258) |
| Paul Vankerkhoven | CEPIC | Aginter Press; WACL; Habsburg network |
The Habsburg network in this table is a reference to this person's central role in setting up and running what this author has been labeling the "Vatican-Paneuropa network". Besides the national branches of Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta, in Belgium this network consisted of such organizations as Mouvement d'Action pour l'Union de l'Europe (MAUE), l'Institut Europeen de Developpement, Académie Europeene des Sciences Politiques, Ordre du Rouvre, the Ligue Internationale de la Liberte (WACL) and Cercle des Nations. All these organizations had overlapping membership and were connected to other, equally reactionary organizations all over Catholic Europe. One of the most important branches in this extremely anti-communist network is the privatized, intelligence-oriented, discussion group Le Cercle, which for over 50 years has brought together questionable individuals connected to European and US intelligence agencies (including CIA heads Casey and Colby, respectively belonging to the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei). It was set up by French prime minister Antoine Pinay and the fascist intelligence agent Jean Violet in the 1950s. Otto von Habsburg acted as a sponsor of Violet. (259)
Interestingly, Violet is known to have been a member of Cercle des Nations, meeting here with such men as Baron de Bonvoisin, Paul Vanden Boeynants, Paul Vankerkhoven, de Merode family, lawyer Jacques Jonet and other anti-communist radicals (260). It's probably no surprise to learn then that most, if not all, of these men, including Violet, belonged to Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta (261). It's also known that Violet, Vankerkhoven and Jonet worked closely with Otto von Habsburg (262).
Opus Dei has come up more than once in Belgium conspiracy history. BOB officers Gerard Bihay and Guy Dussart informed congressional investigators during a closed session that they had been provided information by two nobles belonging to Opus Dei. These two informed the officers that at least 9 members of Opus Dei were involved in a plan to subvert the Belgian state. Several meetings between the conspirators, which included gendarmerie general Fernand Beaurir (accused of incest and pedophilia) and Paul Vanden Boeynants, would have taken place at Castle Dongelberg, an Opus Dei retreat (263). Interestingly, in 1996, both X2 (264) and Nathalie W. (265) mentioned Dongelberg in their testimonies, referring to it as a location where children had been abused by members of the network. X4 has testified that members of Opus Dei had been among her most sadistic clients (266).
Besides de Bonvoisin and Vanden Boeynants, X1 also gave names and details of other persons who played a key role in the fascist network described above. De Baets and Hupez had received stacks of private notes of X1 which she had written up to 6 years before the affair. In one of these notes, which in this particular case could actually have been written after the Dutroux affair broke out, X1 described how she had been raped by a "gendarme officer" who always wore dark brown sunglasses. She remembered also having seen this gendarme officer in Humo magazine several years before her testimony. De Baets immediately thought about Madani Bouhouche, and because he already had suspicions about links to the old Gang of Nijvel dossiers, he gathered photographs of gendarme officers suspected of having played a role in this affair.
| X1 was presented with 40 photographs, some showing real suspects, others from unrelated dossiers (267). After another long and psychologically challenging session, X1 had selected 8 pictures. Three of the selected men clearly were misidentified, as they have never been linked to the extreme-right or the Gang of Nijvel and had been added to the collection for no specific reason. Four other identifications made by X1 turned out to be far more intriguing. One of them was the person De Baets already suspected: Madani Bouhouche. | ||
| The others were former gendarme officer Christian Amory, gendarme colonel Gerard Lhost and the earlier-mentioned gendarme colonel Rene Mayerus (268). According to the authors of 'The X-Dossiers': "X1 identified Madani Bouhouche as the very violent driver of the BMW who took her to 'the factory' and Christian Amory as a sort of slave driver who brought her and her fellow victims to recording studios or parks where older men shot at hunted children. One of the colonels belonged to that group, X1 says. Her account about these kinds of hunting parties on human game, about which X2, X3, X4 and Nathalie W. later also speak, is by far the most controversial part of her testimony... One of the individuals that was recognized used to be a driver in a service [the Diana Group] that was headed by Lhost and was in the possession of heavy black BMWs [earlier reported having seen by X1]." (269) "The factory" X1 regularly spoke about (see above) was a location, where besides regular abuse, snuff movies were shot. Vanden Boeynants' private driver Henri Bil, Baron de Bonvoisin, Annie Bouty, Michel Nihoul, Tony, the controversial lawyer Michel Vander Elst, former prime minister Wilfried Martens, examining magistrate Melchior Wathelet and lawyer Jean-Paul Dumont apparently all went to the ASCO factory to torture and abuse |  Yes, even Madani Bouhouche and some of his associates appeared in the X-Dossiers, and not in the mildest parts either. As Bouhouche took orders from the WNP and FJ, who knows where things might lead. The accused Baron de Bonvoisin and Paul Vanden Boeynants controlled these networks from the Belgian/European side. The American controllers were the CIA, DIA, DEA and Wackenhut. | |
| children (270). In November 1996, X1 took the investigators to the location she had described. On arrival, it turned out that the witness had been talking about the ASCO factory, located just outside Brussels. The description she had given matched, and coincidentally, ASCO was (and is) owned by the Boas family, which used to be close friends and business partners of the late Paul Vanden Boeynants (271). X1 mentioned having seen a "Roger" (272) at the factory, apparently the head of the Boas family who used to be a member CEPIC and Cercle des Nations. | ||
Following is a more detailed description of the men pointed out by X1:
Bouhouche was closely associated with Group G, Front de la Jeunesse, Westland New Post and the Diana Group. He has been accused of involvement in a number of assassinations and break-ins. In 1979, Bouhouche began preparations for a long-term operation to terrorize and extort a number of warehouses. Accomplices in this operation were Robert "Bob" Beyer (BOB), Christian Amory (BOB) Rene Tchang Wei Ling (brother of an important BOB officer), Juan Mendez, and apparently also Jean Bultot (273). This group is widely believed to have had something to do with the Gang of Nijvel. Whether this was the case or not, their operation was cancelled in 1986 after Bouhouche was arrested on suspicions of having murdered Juan Mendez. Confronted with testimonies of Christian Amory, Bouhouche admitted to his interrogators that recruiting Mendez had been an assignment given to him by the WNP leadership and that there was a political motive behind the attacks they had been planning (or, if they were behind the Gang of Nijvel, might actually have carried out) (274).
Additionally, Bouhouche appears to have been closely associated with Michel Nihoul. He went to the fascist Jonathan Club whose owner, Pepe De Rycke (committed suicide in 2001) was on good terms with Nihoul (275). Together with Beyer and Bultot he went to the prestigious Dancing Mirano's, where Nihoul also went (276). The Mirano became embroiled in a drug scandal in the 1980s, but accusations that its owner, Philippe Cryns, ran a child prostitution network were carefully ignored by the magistrates (277). When Bouhouche was arrested in 1986, he picked Jean-Paul Dumont as his legal representative. The earlier-mentioned Dumont, once a member of the CEPIC council, was on close terms with Nihoul, represented leading fascists as Francis Dossogne and Paul Latinus, and shared a law office with the lawyer of Alexis Alewaeters (of the Mirano scandal) and Marc Dutroux (278). As already mentioned, Dumont himself has been accused of child abuse on several occasions. In 1996, X2 testified that she had seen Bouhouche at the Dolo, Nihoul's favorite hang out, talking to Henri Bil (the confidant and private driver of Vanden Boeynants; X1 claimed Bil was one of her abusers who sometimes came to pick her up with Tony for abuse at ASCO) and being involved with some of the child abusers (279).
Christian Amory was a gendarme officer in the BOB section and was part of Bouhouche's criminal Nazi group to some day conduct a terror-extortion campaign against warehouses. He worked in the Walloon-Brabant cell that investigated the Gang of Nijvel and would later become a leading suspect in this case. Together with the Nazi Jean-Francis Calmette he was associated with the mercenary firm Contact in Brussels. Interestingly, in 2003, Amory was prosecuted with Baron Benoit de Bonvoisin and Pierre de Bonvoisin for having forged KGB documents to prove a "vast left-wing conspiracy" against de Bonvoisin involving State Security (280).
Mayerus has been discussed earlier. He was the administrative-director of EIM under MacArthur II, had been a co-founder of the Diana Group, and used to be a good friend of Madani Bouhouche, Jean-Francis Calmette (OAS; Diana Group; Front de la Jeunesse; WNP; Wackenhut; etc.) and PIO head Jean Bougerol. He was one of the more unknown suspects in the Gang of Nijvel case and his picture would have been virtually unknown to anyone in the public.
Gendarme colonel Gerard Lhost, another rather unknown suspect in the Gang of Nijvel case, was head of the Diana Group in the early 1980s. In early 1982, Lhost used his authority to acquire control over the investigation into the arms robbery at the Diana Group, of which Bouhouche would be the top suspect. By April, Lhost had effectively halted the investigation. Colleagues accused him of ignoring leads to the extreme right. Lhost actually knew a lot of fascists from the Front de la Jeunesse circles, and when he left the gendarmerie in 1985, he joined the Security Bureau of the European Commission. Here he teamed up with fascists as Pierre Eveillard (once worked in the cabinet of Paul Vanden Boeynants; his brother Christian was a police commissioner in Etterbeek who protected and visited the notorious Dolo), Robert Thomas (specialist in political violence; apparently ran his own intelligence group, trained members of Nazi organizations like Front de la Jeunesse and Westland New Post), Roland Maffioli (ex-member of the political section of the Brussels BOB, who helped infiltrating neo-nazi Paul Latinus into the State Security Service) and several others. (281)
Even though there are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of these men, it should be remembered that the accusations against Mayerus, Lhost, Amory and Bouhouche are less powerful than many other aspects of X1's testimony. Bouhouche was already Belgium's most famous gangster and his face had appeared in the media here and there. And unfortunately, neither the authors of the book 'The X-Dossiers', nor the Dutroux dossier summary, reported how many of the 40 pictures portrayed real suspects. X1 misidentified three, and possibly four pictures, which at best gives us a 60% accuracy rate. Even when one takes into account the psychological problems X1 had with looking at pictures, or the problems that come into play when trying to recognize someone from a picture (or from a long time ago), it would have been nice if other X-witnesses could confirm more aspects of this part of her testimony. However, seeing how the investigation proceeded, it's likely that most of them have never been asked about these men.
But even without the accusations against these four former gendarmerie officers, it appears that the X-Dossiers are intrinsically linked to earlier Belgian affairs. Whether it involves large scale drug trafficking, assassinations, subversion of state, or underground. abuse and snuff networks, the same individuals and organizations appear time and time again.
The US connection continued
In November 1986, San Francisco police had begun investigating claims of sexual abuse centering around the Army's Child Development Center at the Presidio of San Francisco. During the investigation, in August 1987, one of the girls ran into her abuser while on a shopping trip with her father. She froze, pointed to a person named Lt.-Col. Michael Aquino, and identified him as "Mikey". Mikey, with help of a member of the child day care center staff, had taken her off site to be abused at his home. During the following investigation, the girl could accurately point out the house of Aquino (282) and describe some of the interior details (283).
In October 1987, news of the Presidio molestings hit the local news and it was reported that at least 58 of 100 children who had visited the day care center showed physical and mental signs of sexual abuse (284). Some of the details that came out were that children had been tortured with needles (285) and that some had been forced to drink urine and eat feces (286). The parents sued the day care center for more than 60 million dollars (287), and as time went on, more and more claimed there was a cover up of the facts (288). Aquino was under investigation for a while, but never officially charged with anything (289). The case died a quiet death.
Nevertheless, Col. Aquino was an interesting character and apparently more relevant to the much later X-Dossiers than one would initially anticipate. Instead of having a European fascist connected to NATO and US intelligence, here you have an American fascist working for US intelligence who is touring NATO installations over in Europe. A biography:
| Just after Aquino had finished his undergraduate studies in political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara he became a follower of Anton LaVey, and went on to become a high priest in the Church of Satan (290). He went to Vietnam in the late 1960s to | ||
 Lt.-Col. Michael Aquino, through US intelligence, NATO-Europe, fascism and occult Nazi rituals in Wewelsburg castle closer related to the X-Dossiers than one might initially think. One wonders, during his inspections of European NATO installations, did he meet with men involved with PIO, Front de la Jeunesse or the WNP, possibly even with Vanden Boeynants or Baron de Bonvoisin? It's far from impossible, especially because, according to victim-witness Paul Bonacci, Aquino's special project in Europe was the fascist underground (also Gladio?). In Belgian, who would have been better representatives of this underground than Vanden Boeynants or Baron de Bonvoisin, or at the very least one of their close associates in the military? | become a psychological warfare expert (291). At some point, he served with the Green Berets (292) and in the 1970s he was a liaison officer to NATO in several European countries (293). While on tour visiting NATO installations in Europe, Aquino made a stop-over at Wewelsberg Castle, which, during WWII, used to be Heinrich Himmler's occult SS sanctuary. Aquino even managed to perform a Satanic ceremony in the castle's "Hall of the Dead" (294). In 1981, Aquino was a reserve attache to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) (295) and by 1986 he held a top-secret compartmentalized security clearance, which are given to individuals involved in programs that need to be even tighter controlled than regular top secret programs. He apparently needed this clearance for following studies at the National Defense University (296). At the time the investigation against him was launched, Aquino was a program analyst at the Army Reserve Personnel Center in St. Louis (297). In between all this, he was a licensed securities dealer and an employee of Merrill Lynch (298). But this was not the last we heard about Aquino. In November 1988, federal investigators found out that $35 million had disappeared from a credit union that reported | |
| only to possess $2,5 million in assets. Within weeks of the affair, the local community was abuzz with rumors of a child prostitution network centering around the credit union's owner, Lawrence "Larry" King Jr., a person with highest level connections in Republican circles in both Nebraska and Washington D.C. Senator John W. DeCamp ultimately became the person who brought out the story of victim-witnesses as Alisha Owen, Loretta Smith, Paul Bonacci, Troy Boner and Danny King about life in these abuse networks. DeCamp wrote: | ||
"Paul Bonacci and other child victims have given evidence in great depth on the central role of Lt. Col. Michael Aquino in this depravity. Aquino, alleged to have recently retired from an active military role, was long the leader of an Army psychological warfare section which drew on his "expertise" and personal practices in brainwashing, Satanism, Nazism, homosexual pedophilia and murder..."
"Paul Bonacci reports the following "Monarch"-related activities, often involving his commander at Offutt AFB, Bill Plemmons, and Lt. Col. Michael Aquino... Travel to Dresden in communist East Germany, where weapons were inspected. There and in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Monarch personnel were frequently neo-Nazis. This milieu is a special project of Lt. Col. Aquino, who was a West European advisor to the U.S. Chiefs of Staff. Paul Bonacci has extensive experience in the Aryan Nation and other White Supremacist cults..." (299)
| In his book 'The Franklin Cover-Up', DeCamp explained that the Monarch project in some | ||
| circles was the unofficial name of an extreme mind control network (hard to tell how much of this information was confirmed by his friend William Colby, the former CIA director). The basic idea was to use the alters of people suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) for specific military and intelligence purposes. Unfortunately, alternative personalities are only formed at a relatively young age and only under the most extreme stress, so most people wouldn't even think of carrying out this research. But the Nazis didn't mind, and it was apparently them who had laid the foundations of this research in some of their concentration camps. "An account of the origin of the "Monarch" project has been compiled by those who have been debriefing MPD [same as DID] child-victims. Nazi experimentation in World War II concentration camps were said to have gone beyond simply insane physical tortures. They brainwashed people, for military and strategic purposes. After the war, Allen Dulles and other Western intelligence people brought Nazi doctors out for use in the United States. A teenaged concentration camp inmate named Greenbaum, who had participated to save himself, also came to the United States. Known later as "Dr. Green," [300; important note] he became a high- level brainwasher, and is widely represented in brainwashing programs with a distinctive Cabalistic magic theme." "The killers in the Nazi camps were themselves trained and organized by psychiatrists and eugenicists, operating from the "T4" bureau. These psychiatrists had long been the pets of white supremacist British and American financier networks. At least some of these Nazi doctors were spirited out of Germany under the supervision of for Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman and Tavistock Institute Director John R.. Rees on behalf of the British government. Norman, personally an insane Theosophist who had been chief of the prewar pro-Nazi faction within England, and Rees organized postwar propaganda and continuing psychological warfare activities, and created "Orwellian" groupings within U.S. psychiatry and mental health fields." (301) Although many details still need to be filled in, we've come full circle now. During the 1970s and 1980s, a number of mainly American investigators began to claim that there existed a highly-organized, post-WWII fascist underground, which appeared to be involved in drug running, gold smuggling, weapons trafficking and other subversive activities (Mae Brussel was one of the first and inspired many). The mainstream media generally ignored the claims of these investigators, but in the early 1990s, during the stay-behind affair (Gladio), it became clear that these investigators, at least to a large extent, had been right. The reason for the secrecy surrounding this underground network also became clear: it was ultimately controlled by US intelligence. The stay-behind (Gladio) affair showed how since the end of WWII, the CIA and a number of military agencies have been setting up secret, anti-communist armies in most European countries. Even though there were plenty of regular anti-communist Army officers to pick from, Nazis and other fascists (like pro-colonialists) were appointed to run these clandestine armies instead, which undoubtedly had something to do with all the immoral operations that were to be carried out. In each country this US intelligence controlled network seems to have had the |  Senator John DeCamp, pretty much about as credible as authors come, even though his work in Vietnam and his connections to Colby, to many will sound a little bit too much to be true. Nebraska state newspapers of the 1970s and 1980s frequently mentioned his name. His (incomplete) Who's Who: "state senator; b. Neligh, Nebraska, July 6, 1941... B.A., University Nebraska, J.D... married Ma Thi Nga, October 16, 1978... Member Nebraska Legislature, Lincoln, 1971– ; owner apartment complexes in Nebraska; Served to captain U.S. Army, 1968-70. Member Nebraska Bar Association Republican." Even though he gave the names of many alleged abusers (and child murderers), none of them have dared to take him to court. In fact, the person from this group who was picked to take on DeCamp, soon ended up in jail for child abuse. One major newspaper which wrote a hit piece on DeCamp and his book was soon forced to pay DeCamp "more than a dollar and less than a hundred thousand dollars" in damages. The newspaper also had to publish a retraction and state that DeCamp's research indeed had been sound. | |
| approval of the old pro-colonial aristocracy, which was usually centered around a royal court or a number of hard right political leaders. | ||
As a result of the Kennedy assassination, quite a number of Americans became skeptical of the CIA and launched their own private investigations into this organization. In the following years and decades, various US investigators brought out more and more evidence that the CIA was involved in many things that couldn't stand the light of day. As stated, this included the recruiting of Nazis, infiltration of the domestic media, massive drug- and arms trafficking, organizing coups against legitimate governments, assassinations, false flag terrorist attacks and mind control research. Some of the most well known "rogue" CIA men (and associates) have been Ted Shackley, General John Singlaub, Thomas Clines, Carl Jenkins, David Morales, Raphael Quintero, Felix Rodriguez, Edwin Wilson, Richard Armitage, Albert Hakim, General Richard Secord, and Oliver North. This list is by no means complete, and even includes such former CIA directors as William Colby, William Casey and George Bush.
Of particular interest to this article is Edwin Wilson, who used to be a member of Shackley's "Secret Team". In 1980, Colonel Cutolo wrote an affidavit claiming that Wilson ran large scale surveillance operations in order to receive an advance warning of anyone trying to leak information about CIA drug trafficking operations. Electronic surveillance had been instituted against a number of Senators and Congressmen, numerous police officials, judicial figures and the Catholic cathedrals of New York and Boston. Besides regular surveillance, Wilson was also accused of selling the sensitive information he had acquired to companies that were part of the military-industrial complex, which they in turn used as leverage against Washington politicians to score contracts (302). According to Frank Terpil, the business partner of Wilson in supplying weapons and special forces to Khadaffi from 1976 to 1981, Wilson was involved in the actual blackmail operations.
"According to fugitive ex-CIA officer Frank Terpil, CIA-directed sexual blackmailing operations were intensive in Washington at about the time of the Watergate scandal. One of those operations, Terpil claims, was run by his former partner, Ed Wilson. Wilson's base of operations for arranging trysts for the politically powerful was, Terpil says, Korean agent Ton Sun Park’s George Town Club. In a letter to the author, Terpil explained that ‘Historically, one of Wilson’s Agency jobs was to subvert members of both houses [of Congress] by any means necessary... Certain people could be easily coerced by living out their sexual fantasies in the flesh... A remembrance of these occasions [was] permanently recorded via selected cameras... The technicians in charge of filming. . .[were] TSD [Technical Services Division of the CIA]... The unwitting porno stars advanced in their political careers, some of [whom] may still be in office." (303)
Although Terpil's claims are hard to verify, this still is a very interesting comment. Like Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church, Park had close ties to the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) and more importantly, the CIA and its partly privatized, anti-communist, fascist underground (304). Also, both Moon and Park have been tied to pedophile blackmail operations in the United States. Moon through the activities of his right-hand man, Col. Bo Hi Pak (305), and Park through his George Town Club's first president, Robert Keith Gray.
Gray rose to prominence in the late 1950s as secretary of Eisenhower's Cabinet. After leaving the White House he, for more than three decades, became a leading manager of Hill & Knowlton, one of the most influential Washington lobbying firms, especially during the Nixon and Reagan years. DeCamp noticed that Gray was the "closest friend in Washington" of Harold Anderson, a person accused by several victim-witnesses in the Franklin case of being a pedophile. Gray and his company were tied to the Iran-Contra affair and came out in support of Catholic priest Bruce Ritter, who was accused of pedophilia (306). This priest worked in partnership with Americares, which coordinated its aid missions with the CIA, the Vatican and the Reagan administration. According to DeCamp, Ritter and his Covenant youth organization were at the center of pedophile ring that procured children from South-America. Additionally, Gray used to be a business partner of Edwin Wilson in the years before the latter was arrested for having sold massive amounts of C4 to Khadaffi. Decamp:
"Said to be Harold Anderson's "closest friend in Washington," Gray is also reportedly a specialist in homosexual blackmail operations for the CIA... Gray's associate Wilson was apparently continuing the work of a reported collaborator of Gray from the 1950's—McCarthy committee counsel Roy Cohn, now dead of AIDS. According to the former head of the vice squad for one of America’s biggest cities, 'Cohn's job was to run the little boys. Say you had an admiral, a general, a congressman, who did not want to go along with the program. Cohn’s job was to set them up, then they would go along. Cohn told me that himself.'" (307)
It's becoming routine in this article, but Cohn, a rabid anti-communist sadist, has also been tied to the CIA's fascist underground. According to a 1954 news report, Cohn and his aide David Schine had met up with Spanish members of an international underground Nazi network while on a spy-hunting trip in Europe. Some of the leading members of this network, according to the newspaper, were Col. Otto Skorzeny, Hjalmar Schacht and Werner Naumann (former State Secretary in Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda; among the last to see Martin Bormann) (308). It's hardly a secret these days that Skorzeny, a security consultant to Franco and Juan Peron after the war, was in touch with Nazi terrorists as Yves Guerain Serac (French OAS; Portuguese Aginter Pres) and Stefano Delle Chiaie (P2). The only thing a bit odd about this report is that it speaks about a "Nazi-Communist underground", implying that Naumann and his subversive friends would be interested in working with the Soviet Union in case they managed to overthrow the West-German government. This might sound scary, but it's also ridiculous, as the Nazis, including the post-war ones, were as anti-communist as they came. According to EIR, Cohn could later be found on the board of Permindex, a fascist and intelligence linked company that has been tied to the Kennedy assassination.
Paul Bonacci, one of the victim-witnesses in Franklin affair, also clearly stated Larry King used him in blackmail operations in New York and Washington. The latter was in connection with the activities of a close associate of Larry King, Craig Spence, who was involved in a prostitution ring consisting of underaged boys that were supplied to Washington's upper class, which went right up to the White House (309). Interestingly, it was Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times which first exposed the White House prostitution scandal in 1989.
"Craig J. Spence, an enigmatic figure who threw glittery parties for key officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations, media stars and top military officers, bugged the gatherings to compromise guests, provided cocaine, blackmailed some associates and spent up to $20,000 a month on male prostitutes, according to friends, acquaintances and records..."
"Among the clients identified in hundreds of credit-card vouchers obtained by The Washington Times - and identified by male prostitutes and escort operators - are government officials, locally based U.S. military officers, businessmen, lawyers, bankers, congressional aides, media representatives and other professionals. Mr. Spence's influence appeared unlimited, aptly demonstrated by his ability to arrange midnight tours of the White House, according to three persons who said they took part in those tours."
"Several former associates said his [Spence's] house on Wyoming Avenue was bugged and had a secret two-way mirror, and that he attempted to ensnare visitors into compromising sexual encounters that he could then use as leverage... The man, a business associate of Mr. Spence who was on the White House tour, said: "He was blackmailing people. He was taping people and blackmailing them."...
"[A businessman] described Mr. Spence as "strange," saying that he often boasted that he was working for the CIA... Mr. Spence told him that the CIA might "doublecross him," however, and kill him instead "and then to make it look like a suicide." The businessman also said he attended a birthday bash for Roy Cohn at Mr. Spence's house. He said Mr. Casey was at the party." (310)
| "During the past few weeks, Mr. Spence told several friends that the call-boy operation was being investigated by the U.S. Attorney's Office and other federal authorities as a possible CIA front. He told the friends that the CIA used the service to compromise other federal intelligence | ||
 June 29, 1989, the well-known headline several months after George H.W. Bush had become the new president of the United States. Doesn't it remain strange that it was Sun Myung Moon's paper, whose network has been closely tied to sexual blackmail operations, became responsible for exposing a homosexual blackmail ring so closely tied to the White House? Moon's associate, general Daniel O. Graham (deputy head CIA; head DIA; USGSC; pusher of the Star Wars program), stated in this article that because of this ring, top-Washington officials might have been compromised by the KGB (a little one- sided warning)... Was there a deeper meaning as to why this scandal suddenly had to be (partially) exposed? Was somebody sending a message to the White House? Next to why and how the whole affair was covered up, these also are legitimate questions to be asked. | officials and foreign diplomats. One friend quoted him as saying, "Casey's boys are out to get me"..." "During a lengthy interview at a Manhattan apartment in August, Mr. Spence frequently alluded to deep mysteries. "All this stuff you've uncovered (involving call boys, bribery and the White House tours), to be honest with you, is insignificant compared to other things I've done. But I'm not going to tell you those things, and somehow the world will carry on." He also talked frequently of suicide, saying repeatedly, "My life is over." He reserved deep bitterness for high-powered friends he said had forsaken him. "I've had the world at my house, and now they don't know who I am," he said. "But they did come, didn't they?"" (311) The scandal was first exposed in late June 1989 and by November 1989 Spence had committed suicide. A serious investigation never followed and all records pertaining to the case have been sealed for many decades to come. One of the reporters involved in initially braking the story explained he had been told that these records will eventually be unsealed, but not before "hell freeses over" (312). Just as the 1986 Mirano scandal, the X-Dossiers | |
| contain evidence that sexual blackmail operations, whoever is running them, are not limited to the United States. In 1996, X1 reported how the same activities had been going on in Brussels. Read and compare: | ||
"Since I was 8 or 9 years old, Mitch [Nihoul] would often enough take me with him and give me the assignment to hang around a certain customer. I liked doing that. I enjoyed seeing them shamble around, their efforts to stay out of my way unnoticed. I smiled when Mich asked me to stand next to a customer to make a picture, and how the customer reluctantly smiled and put a weak arm around my shoulder... The glances which were then exchanged between the one taking the picture and the customer were priceless. The customer knew he was trapped... In the night they had been the boss, now they were prey... Too bad that most of them, once they knew they had been trapped, went to experiment even more during the night..."
"In Brussels there was a villa in which a room was set up with built-in cameras. Even in the 1970s these cameras were so discrete that only the people who maintained them and the child- prostitutes knew where they were located... Why did I had to get those guys clearly in the picture, why was I supposed to get them to hit me and brutally rape me? Why was 'regular' sex often not enough?... Blackmail, the word that was never mentioned, I only started to really understand when I was thirteen, fourteen years old..."
"Contracts between the business milieu and the political world, contracts between businessmen amongst each other, fraud with subsidies or licenses, setting up fake firms, criminal contracts like arms trade... everything was possible. And it always ended with sex and children... Pictures were taken, in jest, to keep both parties to their contracts... The men were brought to ideas by child pornography movies that were played at parties... The pimps also had another tactic. They invited a person who could be useful to them. They went to dine with him, and took him - after he had been liquored up - to a 'party'. Men from the top layer of society are used to visiting or getting offered prostitutes. They usually knew that something like this would follow, and the prostitutes they would see upon entering would be slightly older girls, between 16 [sexually mature in Belgium] and 18 years old. More booze and cocaine would be supplied, for ambience. And only then the 'prey' would be taken to a room where a younger girl was waiting, like me, then."
"Most men probably realized only afterwards in what kind of hornet's nest they now found themselves, but by then it was far too late... Men were introduced to the network by colleagues, friends or family members. Carefully or slowly, or briskly after a party. Step by step customers, who first went to bed with me cautiously, were stimulated to rougher sex. I was forced to help them with that... They became complicit and at the same time their mutual connections became tighter. Not one of these people was still inclined to sign contracts with individuals outside the network. If that happened one could make them pay dearly for that..." (313)
To summarize, extreme sadomasochist (SM) obsessions combined with blackmail appear to be the most obvious reasons for the existence of the abuse networks. Judging by some of the names, the extreme abuse almost seems like the ultimate admission test for some aspect of what senior BCCI officials once termed "the black network" (314).
Another frequently mentioned reason for the existence and protection of these high level child abuse networks is mind control research with a specific focus on Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (315). Back in the 1970s, the CIA's past mind-control programs were exposed, but apparently by that time the agency had already transferred these programs to child abusing cults (316). Even if the research itself was not exported to other countries, it's still clear that X1's pimp Tony knew exactly how to deal with X1 when her dissociative identities began to manifest. Question is, who educated him?
More on the Satanic link and the biggest picture possible
Of course, the most controversial explanation for the abuse has hardly been discussed yet: Satanism. Especially outside Christian circles this highly foreign (and silly) topic is generally associated with, if anything, fairytales from the US countryside and maybe a handful of deranged teenage black metal fans. Satanism is a bit more enigmatic than that, however. For starters, there have been a huge amount of reports about Satanic and-or ritual abuse (the latter not necessarily the same as Satanism) since the late 1970s in both the US and UK. Going through newspaper archives will show that especially since the late 1980s the accusations became epidemic with estimates that anywhere between 10,000 to 20,000 survivors of such abuse were getting treatment (317). As usual, the gatekeepers in the press and psychology community refused to take the topic serious and soon came up with the accusation that the therapists were the ones responsible for this "hysteria". Although reports never dried out, the media hardly addresses this issue these days.
Besides the more well known LaVeyan Satanism, which is a basic "spiritual" philosophy for the self-absorbed and mentally disturbed, there's also a more ritual-based Satanism, aka Luciferianism, which is intrinsically linked to the numerous ritual-based mystery cults of the ancient Middle-East and Europe. Without going in the religious details, it's possible that some of the more abominable practices have survived, even if only used in a practical (for recruiting) and symbolic way. Just remember Col. Aquino's Satanic hobbies or what DeCamp wrote about "Dr. Green" being influenced by Cabalistic magic.
Luciferianism, a deceptive and dark form of gnosticism, can still be found in the Memphis Misraim Rite of Freemasonry (34º-99º) (318) and the even more low-profile Martinist and Synarchist Order (319). If these two organizations have any political influence is a good question; as virtually nothing has been written on them we just don't know. It's only because of the internet that a little bit of information can be pieced together. So it appears that Licio Gelli, the former notorious head of the fascist P2 lodge, is a 99º 'grand hierophant' and honorary international head of the Memphis Misraïm Rite in Italy (320). In 2004, there were rumors in Spain that the newly nominated head of the Guardia Civil (equivalent of the Belgian gendarmerie) was picked because of his membership in the Martinist and Synarchist Order (321). Allegedly, the royal house of Serbia, which in 2004 hosted a meeting of the private intelligence group Le Cercle, is also involved in Memphis Misraim and Synarchism (322).
This is about all the information available on membership in these two gnostic organizations. It might be a coincidence, but Gelli (323), Arruche (324) and the royal Karageorgevitch family of Serbia (325) appear to represent a distinctly extreme right-wing milieu, which has not only been highlighted in this article, but also in the article on Le Cercle. In Belgium this milieu has largely been represented by the Vatican and US intelligence-linked right wing of the PSC, and coincidentally, besides numerous accusations of child abuse against PSC members, some have also been accused of ritual abuse and Satanism, albeit largely through Opus Dei.
First up are the claims of Jacques Thoma, who once was a treasurer of the PSC youth division. His boss was the notorious CEPIC member Jean-Paul Dumont, the alleged child abuser (326).
"Jacques Thoma was at a restaurant with Sara de Wachter (01/10/55) when he broke down in tears. He participated in 1985-86 in several satanic sessions close to Charleroi."
"He is very afraid. He was a treasurer of the youth section of the PSC. He often met with Michel Dewolf, Philippe Sala and Jean-Paul Dumont. They tried to direct Thoma toward Opus Dei what they considered Nec Plus Ultra [Latin for "nothing further beyond"]."
"Under the pretext of initiation tests for Opus Dei he was brought to a Black Mass with sexual acts. He mentions the presence of girls from a country in the East (13-14 years)... He was drugged before being taken into a room with masked people who had dressed in black robes. The participants drank blood. He was placed in the presence of a naked little girl laying down on an altar - she had died."
"He encountered the grand master, Francois-Joseph, who told him that he was a police informant and that he had to be careful... Francois-Joseph is a notary implicated in the trafficking of girls for prostitution from the East."
"He wanted to leave but was drugged again. He woke up the following day in his car. He left the party [PSC] and made a declaration to the BSR [Special Investigations Unit of the gendarmerie] in Charleroi." (327)
X4, who also claimed to have been taken to Satanist black masses, fingered Paul Vanden Boeynants, Dumont's boss, as a violent abuser and added that Opus Dei members (like these) had belonged to her most sadistic clique (328).
Psychotherapist Pascal Willems had information on another PSC member, Melchior Wathelet, who together with his mentor Paul Vanden Boeynants was named by X1 as a child abuser (329).
"Since 1992, Brassine was in contact with Pascal Willems, a fellow-psychotherapist. Willems looked after two children (8-10 years) who were victims of child molesters and Satanists... The children would have participated in a combined feast and orgy organized by Melchior Wathelet in a castle located in the region of Verviers. The castle belongs to a private association. Willems would be in the possession of an invitation... This [abuse] went on until the children were put to death. The children came from a children's home with a complicit director."
"At the time, Willems spoke about the affair to the adviser of the SAJ [Les Services de l'Aide à la Jeunesse, or youth support] of Verviers, who told him to keep quiet. He has been intimidated or has been threatened by telephone by the boss of the judicial police in Verviers and by the advisor of the SAJ, and by an anonymous person. Contact between Brassine and Willems in October-November 1995 and at the end of 1996. Brassine speaks of it to Denayer (judicial police in Namur). Following that, Willems was threatened with "suicide" [by a superior of Mr. Denayer]... The 2 files of the SAJ would have disappeared... Willems hid the relevant documents in a safe place at this office..." (330)
The last PSC member to be accused of "sectarian or satanic" activities is Jean-Pierre Grafe. Until the early 1980s, Grafe used to be a board member of CEPIC, alongside Baron de Bonvoisin, Paul Vanden Boeynants, Jean-Paul Dumont and others (331). In 1982 and 1984, shortly after the demise of CEPIC, he was accused of pedophilia and came under investigation. His brother, Jacques, was later convicted for these facts and ended up in jail (332). Besides the prominent but fraudulent Oliver Trusgnach case, there were other unreported charges of child abuse against Grafe (333). As for the Satanist charges:
"Sectarian or satanic activities at the Valmont castle in Merbes-Le-Chateau [Chateau de la Roquette]. Owner of the chateau = Pierre Ferbus (07/01/42). Homosexual - banker BBL [Banque Bruxelles Lambert]. Di Rupo and Graffe would have been seen at these parties... A report of the Police of Lobbes [nearby town, to the north] received the same information concerning Jean-Pierre Graffe... A rapport of the BSR [Special Investigations Unit of the Gendarmerie] in Thuin [another nearby town] contains approaching information." (334)
As you can see, it's not unreasonable to keep an open mind that there could well exist a Satanic abuse cell somewhere within the earlier-mentioned black network. Like with any intelligence project, it would only be necessary for a few ritual and-or occult practitioners of, for example the Memphis-Misraim rite or the Martinist and Synarchist Order (or apparently Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta), to be initiated into this black network while all the rest of the staff and membership of these organizations would know little or nothing about these depraved practices. As for Opus Dei and Knights of Malta, the P2 lodge affair provided evidence that at the highest level these two Catholic organizations were in control, together with US intelligence (335).
In these last few paragraphs clear links have been established between the PSC, Opus Dei, ritual abuse and-or Satanism. Furthermore, in other parts of this article evidence has been provided that US intelligence and the infamous Wackenhut might have been deeply involved in these blackmail and ritual abuse networks. It's important to ask how all this ties together, even though we can't really answer that question at this point. It's still possible though to bring in another related subject and speculate a bit on how the big picture might fit together. Granted, it's the biggest picture possible, but this author thinks it's very likely that these subjects are tied together.
We are referring here to information coming from Dr. Steven Greer and his Disclosure Project. Since the early 1990s, Greer has been in contact with numerous officials from government, intelligence, the military and defense corporations to find out the truth behind the UFO secrecy. In his 2006 book 'Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge' Greer brings up a ton of information that is anything but incompatible with the subject discussed here.
Greer's basic story is that there is a worldwide, private policy group, consisting of about 200 to 300 members, which to varying degrees control the blackest high technology programs on the planet. These projects are overseen and secured by DoD-linked defense corporations (Wackenhut has been mentioned more than once) (336). According to Greer, it's mainly extremist religious groups that are in control of these programs, with the Mormon empire being the most influential (337) (coincidentally, the Mormon church also has its share of accusations of highest level Satanism and child abuse, although the victim-witnesses would be considered less reliable as they usually are extremely-devoted Christian converts). The Knights of Malta and the Jesuits are also mentioned, just as a cell within Opus Dei (338). Greer was also told by a descendant of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton that a compartmented group within NATO dealt with these technologies (339), possibly providing a link to the stay-behind networks and the radical Opus Dei-Knights of Malta aristocracy controlling these networks from the European side. Maybe not entirely unexpected, some of Greer's witnesses also described having witnessed ritual murder with a Luciferian theme.
"[Witness E.J.:] 'I'm very glad you know about this. But do you know something else? Much of this has been placed in facilities all over the world, in the jungle in the Amazon, in Australia, and other remote places. Eventually, I got assigned, to a deeper and deeper level, and before I was going to be deployed to this place in Australia, they took me into another level of my educational program.' He said, 'You don't really know what's going on.' He explained that he witnessed a Satanic ritual initiation. Those present shared blood and there were sacrifices going on and torture. He was being acculturated to the programs of Satanic worship and Satanic sacrifice and the love of the bloodthirsty killing of innocents. He told us that once he got to that level, he had to take a vow to Lucifer. And he did. This is not the first person who's told me about these programs..."
"Now, most people would rather not hear this level of detail, quite frankly. But it's important for them to understand the kind of mindset we're dealing with. One of the gentlemen I'm working with, from a very well-connected family of centi-millionaires who are very involved in diplomatic and intelligence operations, had gone through the programming at a certain meditation institute. He got to Level 14 of the training. He said that unless they could do a profile on you and see that you were to the 'right of Genghis Khan', in terms of wanting to be aggressively violent and destructive, you couldn't get past that level. Since he wasn't wired to be extremely violent and hate-filled, they ended their involvement with him." (340)
Greer has been talking to a lot of people in high places, including friends of Jimmy Carter, members of Bill Clinton's White House staff, CIA director James Woolsey and Lawrance Rockefeller. These men all had come to the conclusion that things were going on above their heads over which they had no control and weren't allowed access. By the mid 1990s, Greer and his team (apparently) had generated a lot of chatter within the halls of Congress and the White House, but nobody in government, including Clinton, decided to push the issue for fear of their lives, and official Congressional hearings were never held, especially not after 9/11. (341) However, recent statements from a researcher named Christopher O'Brien indicate that there actually was some sort of secret inquiry by Congress into this subject. And again, Satanism was not far away.
For years, O'Brien worked closely with the Sheriff's Department of the San Luis Valley in investigating the enigmatic cattle mutilations in this area. Although the subject remains both as confirmed and unexplained as ever, he did manage to correct a number of popular misconceptions about this phenomenon. Skipping all details of his much-better-than-average research, O'Brien came to suspect a ritualistic aspect in a small number of animal slayings (although he suspects most are the result of various environmental monitoring programs by some unknown government-linked group) that appeared to follow the few really "high strangeness" cases he had come across. Things only became really interesting when O'Brien spoke with the chief investigator for the local District Attorney's office, who had been at a seminar of a law enforcement officer who was expert in ritual occult crime. The two had entered into private discussion about the cattle mutilations in the San Luis Valley, during which the ritual abuse expert conceded a number of interesting facts to O'Brien's later source (342). O'Brien:
"I probably shouldn't even say that, because I'll probably just doom myself for any publisher picking it up, but I do have some evidence from law enforcement sources that do validate this particular theory. I can't get too far into it, but I've been told by law enforcement that a part of our government does know that there is a quasi-military group out there that's doing ritual magic involving ritual blood sacrifice, and not only cows; the inference being humans..." (343)
"[This] law enforcement officer, who is an expert in ritual crime,.. was called to Washington to testify in front of a secret Congressional inquiry group about some sort of group outside of the government but with access to military technology that was doing ritual occult crime. And he, they, mentioned [some] cattle mutilations as one aspect of this crime..." (344)
It's impossible to guarantee, of course, if what Greer's witnesses and O'Brien are talking about is true. But it does offer some perspective on how things might fit together at the international level and why there is such a consistent cover-up in every country where these high level abuse- and drug trafficking networks are about to be exposed. There's never really been an explanation as to how this is possible, even though it can be observed by anyone who does his homework. As for now, the claims pertaining to child abuse, extreme sadomasochism and Satanism are quite coherent, fit in with earlier accusations since the 1970s, and should be investigated further without being dismissed out of hand. If any mistakes have been made, they will just have to be corrected on the way.
| Conclusion Clearly it's possible with the Dutroux affair - which ultimately has surprisingly little to do with Dutroux himself - to take things as far as one wants. The one thing that is certain is that | ||
| Dutroux was not an exception in terms of sexual preferences and brutality, even if, hypothetically, he wasn't (loosely) attached to an abuse network. The Belgian judiciary and press never wanted to hear about networks and sabotaged and ridiculed anyone who tried to prove the opposite. Ironically, especially in Britain the existence of these networks, especially through the internet, has increasingly been acknowledged. It's also a fact that the Dutroux case was handled entirely different in the British press than in most of the Belgian press, showing just how easy it is to simulate objectivity. This does not withstand that even though the British press occasionally prefers to expose an overseas sexual abuse scandal, at least to some extent, they are not always very good at doing the same thing in their own country. In Belgium, at the very least the evidence seems to point to a loose network of criminals, fascist militants, businessmen, law enforcement officers and child abusers who frequently met one another in such clubs as Les Atrebates, the Dolo, the Jonathan, Le Clin d'Oeil, the Co-Cli-Co, Platos, Les Trois Canards, Coco Beach, Le Perroquet, the Euro 92 bar in Tervueren or the prestigious Mirano. According to the testimonies, child abuse was regularly going on in the private areas of these clubs, or possibly after closing time, at certain evenings, or in nearby apartments belonging to the club owner. Furthermore, X1 quite convincingly pointed out that the hotel-villa of X1's grandmother, one of Annie Bouty's homes, and the ASCO factory were other similar "safe-houses" for various forms of child abuse. Other witnesses pointed to a whole range of other villas, country houses and castles where abuse parties had been held. The problem with the above theory, of course, is that it's impossible for the mafia and a handful of mid- to higher level officials to hide their involvement in all these dirty schemes. Highest level cover in combination with the cooperation of the press is necessary to facilitate a cover up of this magnitude. And coincidentally, with names as Baron de Bonvoisin, Paul Vanden Boeynants, Etienne Davignon and Maurice Lippens we have alleged abusers with endless connections in intelligence and covert operations, the judiciary, law enforcement, regular politics and the globalist elite. Within Belgium several of the most senior judges, like Melchior Wathelet and Jean Depretre (not counting Van Espen), were named as abusers, and coincidentally they played crucial roles in earlier affairs where cover ups and manipulations had been going, like the Pink Ballets and the Gang of Nijvel. Maybe it now becomes obvious why everything in the Dutroux dossier that pointed to a larger network just had |  Child Focus, or the European Center for Missing and Sexually Exploited Children, was founded in 1998 by Daniel Cardon de Lichtbuer and headed by this person ever since. In 2005, de Lichtbuer became chairman of the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC), headquartered in Washington and founded in 1999. Who is this Lichtbuer? First of all, he is quite big in the financial world, with former positions in Banque Bruxelles Lambert, the Belgian Bankers' Association, VP Bank Liechtenstein (with Nikolaus von Liechtenstein), Thomas Cook Traveller Cheques and the European Financial Marketing Association. He also has been executive president of the aristocratic Europa Nostra. But things become really problematic upon reading that de Lichtbuer is a member of the honorary committee of Cercle de Lorraine, together with with Maurice Lippens and Etienne Davignon. Equally worrying is his position as honorary executive president of the Koninklijke Vereniging der Historische Woonsteden en Tuinen van België, together with prince Alexander de Merode (former chair) and Count Ghislain d'Ursel. Davignon used to be a board member too. There's another indication that de Lichtbuer might not be the best choice for an anti- child abuse organization: 1998, Stef Janssens, 'The names from the cover up', p. 33: "In 1989, [Nicolas] de Kerchove d'Ousselghem [CEPIC; chef de cabinet of Vanden Boeynants; contact of VdB to the PIO intelligence organization] and Paul Vankerkhoven, CEPIC member and co-founder of Cercle des Nations [among many other things]... were employees of the magazine 'Revue Belge'. This right-wing magazine had as manager the present director of the Center for Missing Children and former BBL-director Daniel Cardon de Lichtbuer. What in itself is not reprehensible, but does say something about the milieu in which the present director of this Center was involved with." To clarify, that milieu appears to be the highest level child abuse milieu. | |
| to disappear (345). Belgium can easily handle the conviction of a Dutroux, or even a Nihoul with all his political connections, but, as some have stated, it's very uncertain if Belgium would be able to handle the X-witnesses and the chain reaction they would set in motion. Predictions that a full expose of the X-testimonies would result in a break up of Belgium might not be that much of an exaggeration, not to consider the international ramifications. | ||
But it's only here that we are really out on a limb for the first time in this article, because the X-witness testimonies will not be known to the general public for a long time to come, and it will take even longer before any investigations might be reopened.
Notes
| [1] | *) PV 150.889, March 24, 1997, 'Translation of a March 18, 1997 fax from X1; factory; Clo': "[X1] saw that Sandra sucked de Bonvoisin and that Wathelet raped Mieke". X1 accused Melchior Wathelet of being one of the more violent child abusers at the ASCO factory, together with Paul Vanden Boeynants and Baron de Bonvoisin. *) Also accused in PV 151.046, March 23, 1997: "Since 1992, Brassine was in contact with Pascal Willems, a fellow-psychotherapist. Willems looked after two children (8-10 years) who were victims of child molesters and Satanists... The children would have participated in a combined feast and orgy organized by Melchior Wathelet in a castle located in the region of Verviers. The castle belongs to a private association." According to the PV (official report), Willems was severely intimidated by the local head of the judicial police and the advisor of its local youth support section. More information in the 'victims and witnesses' appendix. |
| [2] | 1996, Fred Vandenbussche (Het Volk journalist, one of the largest Belgian newspapers), 'Meisjes verdwijnen niet zomaar' ('Girls don't just disappear'), p. 32. |
| [3] | Ibid., p. 68-69. This claim has been repeated in several newspapers, but in less detail. |
| [4] | June 21, 1999, The Financial Times, Television preview, Channel 4, 9:00: "[Dutroux] boasted to his neighbor Claude Thirault of the ease with which children could be abducted and then sold. While working on one of Dutroux's four properties in Charleroi, Thirault noticed two water tanks which had been altered to allow access from below. When asked about these, Dutroux baldly stated that he used them for hiding children before sending them abroad. Thirault became an informer and shared all these facts with the police, but they failed to act on these leads or pass on the intelligence to other forces across the country. The police's conduct was marked by disastrous ineffectuality and incompetence." |
| [5] | Het Volk, Dutroux case timeline: "June 17, 1995: The gendarmerie of Charleroi writes an official report about an illegal modification to Dutroux's home. It's about the widening of a basement hole where an air pipe sticks out from." http://www.hetvolk.be/Article/PrintArticle.aspx?ArticleID=hno19022004_033 |
| [6] | *) 1996, Fred Vandenbussche, 'Meisjes verdwijnen niet zomaar', p. 69-70. *) Also documented in: May 18, 2004, De Standaard (large newspaper), 'Claude Thirault meldde kelderwerken aan rijkswacht' ('Claude Thirault reported basement works to gendarmerie'). Other sources generally summarize this aspect by stating that Thirault tried to inform the gendarmerie about Marc Dutroux since 1993. |
| [7] | 1996, Fred Vandenbussche, 'Meisjes verdwijnen niet zomaar', p. 71. |
| [8] | Ibid., p. 76 |
| [9] | Ibid., p. 86: "In turn those observations are just a joke, keeping in mind the status of Dutroux as a suspect in a kidnapping case, which, we might assume, would require some urgency for the victims. Six times in two months Dutroux is shadowed, a total of about fifty hours, despite the use of time-energy-saving time laps... That's not even two percent of the total observation period, and according to experienced police officers, so ridiculously little that it was as good as useless." |
| [10] | 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-Dossiers', p. 379-380: "Already at the beginning of the investigation Tony V. [X1's pimp] had been shadowed by the SIE [Diana Group]. That happened in the old-fashioned way. He was followed by agents in plain clothes from nine in the morning to ten in the evening. The first shadow operation happened between 18 and 20 October 1996, the day of the White March - what would have been about the worst possible moment to catch a pedophile in the act... At the Neufchateau cell the same question arose as after the observations of Marc Dutroux during the secret Othello operation: Why did they already call it a day at 10 o'clock in the evening?" |
| [11] | *) 1996, Fred Vandenbussche, 'Meisjes verdwijnen niet zomaar', p. 88-89: "Operation Othello was not the only source which could have put the judiciary of Charleroi on the right trail of the child kidnapper. Early October 1996 - almost three months after the disappearance of Julie and Melissa and several weeks after the disappearance of An and Eefje - the justice department of Charleroi receives an anonymous letter in the mail, addressed to 'an examining magistrate'. The author warns for the strange habits of one Marc Dutroux... The neighbors complain about the annoying nightly activities of Dutroux. During the day the doors and windows of the house are never opened, the windows on the first floor always remain sealed with black plastic sheets, as if something is being hidden, in the garden hundreds of used car tires are stored. On top of that, the neighbors report to have noticed two 'young girls of sixteen or eighteen years old' in the backyard, who apparently remain in the house but don't belong in the neighborhood and never appear on the streets during daylight... The author of the letter is later identified as Jeanine Lauwens, the mother of Marc Dutroux... [long explanation about how this information was handled by the justice department]... But no bells start to ring. Dutroux is not brought in connection with An and Eefje. And the letter of his mother is not even added to the already thick dossier of Operation Othello... In any case, the information from Operation Othello is kept indoors. Charleroi would never inform the district attorney's offices who struggle with the investigation into the missing girls. Liege/Luik (Julie and Melissa) and Brugge (An and Eefje) get nothing from Charleroi." *) Nov 17, 1996, the Sunday Times, 'Women dote on Belgian paedophile; Murder': "It is a sentiment shared by Dutroux's own mother, Jeanine Lauwens who, it has emerged, wrote in vain to the police warning them about her son long before he was arrested. "I knew he could not be trusted," she said recently." |
| [12] | *) 1996, Fred Vandenbussche, 'Meisjes verdwijnen niet zomaar', p. 42: "The basement under the home of Dutroux-Martin has the shape of an upside-down L, what clearly deviates from the rectangle living room on top. That shape has to have been noticed immediately by the detectives who searched the basement - and they would have to have wondered what was hidden behind those angular extra walls. The basement of a rental apartment maybe? Not a chance, because the home next to house 128 at route de Philippe-ville is a garage, without a basement entrance. Also the wood- and plasterwork of that peculiar part in the basement differs from the other walls, which are bare and consist of very old bricks with mortar crumbling from the moister. But the walls which Dutroux has built in the basement and after which the cell bunker is hidden, have been carefully finished with plastic panels... Did nobody ask why those two basement walls had been so carefully maintained while the rest looked so old? One tap with the finger against the plasterwork would have been sufficient to hear the sound of a hollow space. Those sound totally different than a tap on the other, solid basement walls..." *) March 31, 2004, Het Nieuwsblad (same as Het Volk), 'Slotenmaker: 'Ik hoorde twee kleine meisjes'; Slotenmaker spreekt theorie van rijkswachter Michaux tegen' ('Locksmith: 'I heard two little girls'; locksmith contradicts the theory of gendarme officer Michaux'): "[Father of Julie Lejeune:] But the wall which hid the cage had been freshly painted. White. The rest of the basement was an unimaginable mess, you said yourself. That would have to have been noticed?" - [Michaux:] 'I didn't think of that, Mr. Lejeune. Really. Renovation was going on everywhere in that house. It was a dump, really. I am sure - if I had entered again today and would hear the same thing [children's voices] - that I still wouldn't find the cage.'" |
| [13] | March 31, 2004, Het Nieuwsblad (same as Het Volk), 'Slotenmaker: 'Ik hoorde twee kleine meisjes''; Slotenmaker spreekt theorie van rijkswachter Michaux tegen ('Locksmith: 'I heard two little girls'; locksmith contradicts the theory of gendarme officer Michaux'): "[Lejeune testified:] I remember almost nothing of the house search, except one thing: when I went down with Rene Michaux and handed him a searchlight, we both clearly heard two children's voices. Of two little girls. One said three or four words, the other briefly answered; one word of one syllable. It lasted a few seconds. At that moment, a colleague of Michaux came running down the stairs making a lot of noise. Michaux shouted: "Tais-toi - Silence!" We heard nothing after that anymore." Michaux stated that they heard no voices, only a short murmur. |
| [14] | 1996, Fred Vandenbussche, 'Meisjes verdwijnen niet zomaar', p. 43: "With his wife Louisa he [the father of Julie] went into the basement, the hell in which his daughter died, had himself locked into the concrete dungeon, sighed and spoke without raising his voice. 'And from outside the dungeon Louisa understood every word.'" |
| [15] | *) 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-Dossiers', p. 72: "On December 6, 1995 Marc Dutroux is arrested. He stays in the prison of Jamioulx until March 20. It is the time of the house searches of BOB officers Rene Michaux in the Marcinelle home. He hears children's voices there, but ignores them. He confiscates a video there on December 13, 1995, marked 'Perdu de Vue, Marc'. He also finds chains, locks and keys - apparently stuff with whom he chained down An and Eefje. A speculum, a small bottle of vaginal cream, chloroform... More than three years after the facts it also turns out that Michaux confiscated a videotape on which Dutroux had taped himself working on his basement and raping a Czech girl." *) May 5, 2002, The Observer, 'Review: Investigation: Belgium's silent heart of darkness': "He found a speculum on the floor which he lifted, handled and returned to Dutroux's wife without forensic analysis. They found films which went undeveloped and videos which they didn't watch. Had they done so, they would have seen Dutroux building the dungeon." *) February 21, 2004, The Daily Mail, 'Devil of the dungeon': They found a speculum - a medical instrument used for vaginal examinations - but accepted that it belonged to Dutroux's wife. They found videos marked 'Laurel and Hardy' and 'Disney', which they did not bother to play. Had they done so, they would have seen Dutroux raping his victims. *) 1996, Fred Vandenbussche, 'Meisjes verdwijnen niet zomaar', p. 38: "[Laetitia] is able to explain quite clearly how she has been abused, how Dutroux abused her and how camera shots had been made of that. That didn't really surprise the detectives. They found piles of videotapes at Dutroux's where, cleverly between Tom and Jerry and Laurel and Hardy, several minutes of hardcore child pornography was hidden... again and again with that same Marc Dutroux in the leading role: naked, busy sexually molesting sleeping or unconscious girls. The children, not more than about ten different [ones]... are impossible or hard to recognize, but it's certain that neither Laetitia, nor Sabine, nor Julie, nor Melissa, nor An, nor Eefje can be found in those videos. If recordings have been made of Laetitia, as she stated herself, then where are they?" |
| [16] | The whole story is documented in: *) 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-Dossiers', p. 124-126. *) 2004, Herwig Lerouge (used to be editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine Solidair), 'Het Dossier Nihoul: De knoop in het proces-Dutroux' ('The Nihoul Dossier: The knot in the Dutroux trial'), p. 137-138. Most of the story can be found in the 'investigators' appendix. |
| [17] | January 18, 1997 note from officer Theo Vandyck (Nathalie W.'s first primary interviewers) that was incorporated in the X-Dossier. |
| [18] | May 11, 2004, Het Volk, 'Rene Michaux has to testify again': "[Bourlet:] "Sabine and Laetitia have spent 48 hours too long in the cage in Marcinelle. Their suffering could have been two days shorter. Why? That's what I've been asking myself in the past eight years... Why didn't Michaux find the letters of Sabine which she had hidden under the carpet?" Michaux reacted by saying: "I was searching for Laetitia, not for some letters. I sure wouldn't have found Laetitia under the carpet."" |
| [19] | April 7, 2004, Herwig Lerouge en Axel Bernard for Solidaire, 'Proces Dutroux-Nihoul; Aarlen en Brussel, een wereld van verschil' ('Dutroux-Nihoul trial; Aarlen and Brussels, a world of difference'). This article talks about how Michaux, who headed both the late 1995 and August 1996 searches of Dutroux's homes, appears to have made numerous procedural mistakes and how most of his statements on the videos he found contradict each other. http://www.solidaire.org/international/print.phtml?section=A2AAAGBA &object_id=23324 |
| [20] | *) August 25, 1996, The Observer, 'The Child Abusers': "Hundreds of videos of children being abused have been found at one of the houses. Marc Dutroux is taking part in sex with children in some the videos, and they are being studied to see if the children can be also identified." *) August 27, 1996, The Times, 'Police link murdered girl to child-sex case': "Police have seized more than 300 video tapes, featuring Dutroux and others in sexual acts with children. Michel Bourlet, the chief prosecutor, has promised to book all adults appearing in them, provided, he said, "that I am allowed to"." |
| [21] | *) 1996, Fred Vandenbussche, 'Meisjes verdwijnen niet zomaar', p. 114: "... detectives who have to go through the nearly 5000 confiscated videos to identify faces of victims and abusers." *) October 17, 1996, The Independent, 'Belgian protest goes on despite justice promise': ""Everything is being done to pursue the investigation," he [justice minister Stefaan De Clerck] said, adding that 350 people are now working full time on the case sifting through 5,000 videos of child pornography for incriminating evidence." 350 people working on the Dutroux case is a fact, but it seems that the 5,000 videos is something that was added by The Independent, assuming this was an already confirmed fact. *) October 21, 1996, The Daily Mail, 'A human tide on the turn against evil': "That extraordinary decision, compounded by the initially inept investigation, has fueled suspicion of a cover-up to protect VIPs reported to feature in some of the 5,000 child sex videos seized at Dutroux's house... A recent opinion poll revealed that 95 per cent of Belgians believed that prominent politicians and police were involved in the paedophile ring." *) November 10, 1996, The Mail on Sunday, 'The grief that turned to rage': "As the bewildered Belgians tried to make sense of what was going on, incredible rumours began circulating that Dutroux might have been protected in some way, that he had friends in high places. Pornographic videos taken from his home were said to feature prominent individuals, one a senior member of the Roman Catholic church. It almost defied belief. Who would protect a psychopath, other than people with something truly terrible to hide?... 'It is quite obvious,' said Katarin de Clercq, Belgian co-ordinator of the pressure group End Child Prostitution Abduction and Trafficking, 'that some people were protecting Dutroux. The government tried to convince us that he was a lone serial killer and psychopath, but now we hear stories about unnamed famous personalities being involved in sex orgies and blackmail and pornographic video tapes. People feel that something is completely wrong here and we have to show we will not tolerate it.'" |
| [22] | 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-Dossiers', p. 95: "After the Dutroux affair broke there was speculation for weeks about videos and pictures that would have been found in his homes. Ultimately it would turn out that nothing of this was true." A simple statement maybe, but if there was any truth to the previous statements about the 300 to 5,000 videos these authors undoubtedly would have found out details about it. |
| [23] | April 7, 2004, Herwig Lerouge en Axel Bernard for Solidaire, 'Proces Dutroux-Nihoul; Aarlen en Brussel, een wereld van verschil' ('Dutroux-Nihoul trial; Aarlen and Brussels, a world of difference'): "We still don't know how many videos there were. On March 20, 1996, everything is given back to the lawyer of Dutroux. To this day the confiscated videos of Operation Othello remain a total mystery. Why did the gendarme leadership want those videos at any cost? Why did Dutroux get them back? Have copies been made? What has happened with these? How did commandant Schot knew there were porn scenes on them? They weren't even used to advance the investigation." |
| [24] | 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-Dossiers', p. 93-113. It took 11 days for Nihoul to come up with an alibi for August 9, 1996 the day Laetitia was kidnapped and Nihoul was assumed to have been seen in Bertrix. The alibi was provided by, of all people, the lawyer Michel Vander Elst. Vander Elst was a visitor of the Dolo and had once been convicted for having provided false alibis for members of the Haemers Gang, after they had kidnapped Paul Vanden Boeynants. Initially, Vander Elst was named as one of the masterminds of the kidnapping after investigators had found out that the kidnappers had been in continuous contact with Vander Elst. Vander Elst was named by X1 as among those involved in sadistic games with young girls and as someone who visited the ASCO torture factory. Vander Elst was a regular advisor to the BVBA Audio Corporation since 1992, which has been linked to pedophilic practices. Additionally, manager of the BVBA Audio Corporation was Joseph Schulman, whose brother Charles was married to the sister of Bernard Weinstein. Nihoul's alibi for August 9 was largely confirmed although participants of an evening barbecue which Nihoul attended couldn't get their story straight. One of the inconsistencies was that Vander Elst claimed that Nihoul came with Bouty, while all others claimed that Nihoul came with Marleen De Cockere. It was only in mid-1997 that a breakthrough was forced. Michel Bourlet was contacted by family V., which had seen Nihoul in Bertrix where Laetitia was kidnapped, and had to hear how this family wanted to withdraw their testimonies after having been intimidated over a period of many months. The family (again) mentioned how they were sure that they had seen Nihoul and how they later that day attended an evening market. That last remark prompted Bourlet to launch an inquiry into the date when this evening market had been organized, something which the original interviewers of the family somehow didn't think of (they just told the family it had indeed been organized on August 9). It turned out that the evening market had been organized on August 8 and that this was the date the family had seen Nihoul at the swimming pool in Bertrix where Laetitia would be kidnapped the next day. The details the family gave about the evening market proved they had been there. The family was shown car wrecks for Dutroux's garden and they picked out the Renault Trafic that they had seen on the parking lot of the swimming pool where Laetitia was kidnapped the next day. It was the same Renault Trafic that other witnesses had pointed out as having seen in Bertrix on August 8 and 9 with Dutroux in or next to it. |
| [25] | *) 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-Dossiers', p. 111-112: "That small inattentiveness of the gendarme officer has far-reaching consequences for the Nihoul dossier. The whole investigation around the alibi of of Nihoul, now for August 8, has to be entirely redone one year after the facts. Family V. will we heard a total of eleven times. What they exactly did that day, who they saw... [They had been standing face to face with Nihoul, Dutroux and Lelievre at the Bertrix swimming pool for at least half an hour the day before the kidnapping of Laetitia after having visited this same swimming pool] Inquires are made at the police of Bouillon. That of the porch-merchant is accurate. The three family members again are shown a series of pictures of the cars and wrecks from the backyard of Dutroux. They pick out the Renault Trafic of Dutroux - he had two of them - which they had been looking at [because it was such a wreck and had been planning to buy a new car] on the parking lot of the swimming pool. It is the same car as the student pointed out. In addition to the Flemish family seven others testified in Bertrix that they had seen Nihoul in Bertrix. Some spoke about August 8, others were in doubt about the exact day. Miss M.H. is sure that she had seen Nihoul the evening before the kidnapping on the Croix-Mauray-square in Bertrix. A young female cook of the near bye camping has seen Nihoul just past midnight standing on the side of the road, next to the parked van of Dutroux. 'Our working day was over, I drove home with a group of friends', she told. 'We were near Herbeumont, near Bertrix. That's where that van was. We slowed down, because it seemed as if they had car trouble. That's why I could take a good look at the people who were standing next to it. About one of them I'm sure. That was Nihoul. I remember this so well, because soon after the disappearance of Laetitia the gendarmerie stopped by the camping to ask a few question.'" *) January 18, 2003, Het Niewsblad, 'Dutroux, Lelièvre en Martin naar assisen' ('Dutroux, Lelièvre and Martin to assizes'): "Some witnesses claimed to have seen Nihoul at the swimming pool of Bertrix the day before the kidnapping of Laetitia. The council chamber is of the opinion 'that the witness testimonies lack any coherence'. [which is ridiculous to say the least] |
| [26] | 2004, Herwig Lerouge, 'Het Dossier Nihoul: De knoop in het proces-Dutroux' ('The Nihoul Dossier: The knot in the Dutroux trial'), p. 62-63. Cites PV 2.557, August 29, 1996. |
| [27] | Ibid., p. 60-61. Cites PV 2.739, October 9, 1996, part 2688 (apparently not taken up in leaked Dutroux dossier summary). |
| [28] | Ibid., p. 72-73. Cites PV 100.223, August 19, 1996 and PV 100.241, August 22, 1996. |
| [29] | Ibid., p. 62. Cites PV 2.557, August 29, 1996. |
| [30] | June 22, 2004, Planet Internet News (Netherlands), 'Dutroux krijgt levenslang en tbs' ('Dutroux gets life and tbs'): "Michel Nihoul got five years for drug smuggle and trafficking in women, instead of the requested ten years. His defence pleaded that Nihoul was only guilty of the drug offences, gangsterism and trade in humans." Nihoul has been convicted so many times for financial fraud that it apparently wasn't even interesting enough to repeat it in this article. *) April 16, 2007, Gazet van Antwerpen (Gazette of Antwerp), 'Nihoul wil namen noemen die 'gecensureerd' zijn' ('Nihoul wants to name names that are 'censored''): "On June 22, 2004, Nihoul was sentenced by the court of assizes of Aarlen. He was found guilty of leading a gang of criminals involved in trade in drugs, cars, identity papers and humans. He was acquitted of facts that pertain to the kidnapping of children. He was released on probation on April 26, 2006." |
| [31] | June 17, 2004, Planet Internet News (Netherlands), 'Dutroux schuldig aan drie moorden' ('Dutroux guilty of three murders'): "The jury was divided over the question if businessman Michel Nihoul is guilty of kidnapping. But Dutroux's co-defendant Michel Nihoul, according to the court of Aarlen, is not guilty or an accomplice in the kidnapping, rape or murder of the girls. That is what the three judges ultimately have decided. The judges had to decide on that, because the twelve members of the jury declared him guilty with a minimal majority of seven to five. In these instances Belgian law states that the judges have to decide. The possible involvement of Nihoul in the kidnappings really was the key question in the Dutroux trial. Because he now has not been found guilty, there really isn't any evidence for the theory that has been going round in Belgium that there were larger networks of pedophiles behind the kidnappings of the girls." [Yes, a rather bizarre statement] |
| [32] | *) July 3, 2004, De Morgen (Belgian newspaper), 'Tien redenen voor een proces-Dutroux-bis' ('Ten reasons for another Dutroux trial'): "The jury has judged that Nihoul was a member of the Nihoul-Dutroux- Lelievre gang which was active in human- and drug trade, car swindle and fake identities. His claim that he would have infiltrated the Dutroux gang as a police informant is not being believed... Seven of the twelve jurors are convinced of the involvement of Dutroux in the kidnappings [of Dutroux's victims]. Such a vote is only normal, as against the numerous witness testimonies, suspicious transactions or physical- and phone contacts, Nihoul only countered with lies, also at the trial. The professional judges have saved Nihoul. That has been confirmed by the jurors. The jury did not pass on the hot potato of the question of guilt of Nihoul to the professional magistrates. "It was a real vote", multiple jurors say to De Morgen, "and this was the result. We thought: the court will follow the majority. But that's exactly what it didn't do. That was a shock to many of us. That's not what we expected." All questions about ties between Dutroux and a possible organized form of child trade and -abuse remain open. We still don't know what happened to Julie and Melissa. For seven year Langlois has hold on to the thesis that they died from starvation during the jail sentence of Dutroux in late 1995, early 1996. At the trial this version turns out to be untenable. Even the nutrition expert, who wrote a report at his [Langlois'] orders, says that. But what did happen?... We know nothing about it. Because Langlois wasn't even willing to identify the DNA of more than twenty unknown individuals who had been in the basement of Dutroux, just as the sperm of an unknown individual which had been mixed in with material belonging to Julie. He didn't want to compare that DNA with a number of known pedophiles, in part from Nihoul's circle of acquaintances... Langlois wanted to get everything out of the picture which wouldn't lead to the lonesome pervert... He has refused to take up in the dossier the official reports dealing with the connections of Nihoul to organized crime. Supposedly because they didn't have anything to do with the kidnappings. Five heads of investigation came to complain at the trial: Langlois had forbidden them to look into the milieu of organized crime, neither around Nihoul, nor the mafia in Charleroi. Within the federal police there still is a gendarme hierarchy active, which allows the officers to put pressure on their subordinates. To this day, ex-gendarme officers, under the watchful eye of their former superiors, come to give false testimonies, even under oath. Examining magistrate Tollebeek, tasked with the investigation into the kidnapping of Sabine, confirmed that, just as honorary prosecutor Poncelet of Mons." *) 2004, Herwig Lerouge, 'Het Dossier Nihoul: De knoop in het proces-Dutroux' ('The Nihoul Dossier: The knot in the Dutroux trial'), p. 209: "Langlois doesn't exactly know who did what. He never clarified the circumstances in which Julie and Melissa were kidnapped, raped and murdered. He doesn't know when, why, by whom, or on whose account this has happened. He doesn't how it is possible that the two girls survived in the basement of Dutroux for 106 days, in the absence of their kidnapper." Also, don't forget note 25, about Nihoul having been spotted at Laetitia's kidnapping site. |
| [33] | The individual stories of these victims have largely been written down in the 1999 book 'The X-Dossiers'. Certain details in the biography are referenced in the appendixes or later on in the article. |
| [34] | That's the basic story one gets when reading through reports of children being abused in networks. In most cases involving children born in the West the abuse starts at home, which of course includes foster homes (can't really vouch for the second and third world). *) December 13, 1987, Syracuse Herald Journal (based on an AP story), ''Blaming the devil' hurts prosecution of child abuse cases': "The federally funded American Humane Association in Denver says 113,000 child molestations vere reported nationwide in 1985, the last year for which statistics were compiled. That figure is up from 100,000 reported cases in 1984... In 75 percent of reported cases, abuse comes from within the family, [AHA spokeswoman Katie] Bond said..." *) Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) website, statistics section, information based on the 2005 National Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice: "Contrary to the belief that rapists are hiding in the bushes or in the shadows of the parking garage, almost two-thirds of all rapes were committed by someone who is known to the victim. 73% of sexual assaults were perpetrated by a non-stranger — 38% of perpetrators were a friend or acquaintance of the victim, 28% were an intimate and 7% were another relative." |
| [35] | A major clue is the regular references to high society figures able to stay out of sight in the wake of a major child abuse scandal. Examples: *) The Dutroux case is a pretty clear example in which all leads to a larger network surrounding Dutroux and Lelievre were ignored. *) June 6, 1996, The Guardian, 'True scandal of the child abusers': "From East Belfast's Kincora Boys' Home, via Leicestershire, Staffordshire and London, to the children's homes of Clwyd, we have witnessed 25 years of cover-up. Cover-up, not to protect the innocent but to protect the regularly named elements of the British establishment who surface whenever widespread evidence of child abuse is exposed. From the public schools right through to the Catholic and Anglican churches, child abuse has been allowed a special place of sanctuary... Social workers, police, security services, local and national political figures remain the common factors in the fall-out from the [child abuse] inquiries... In case after case the cycle is described - a child is 'taken into care', then abused in a home, handed on to an outside paedophile ring and out on to the rent-boy/prostitution circuit beyond, if they live that long... Journalists find themselves battling first with authority, then with the libel laws, to publish the truth about a vast web of abuse." *) June 3, 2003, The Guardian, 'Toulouse officials ordered murder, says serial killer' (longer extracts can be found in the column on the left): "Alègre [a jailed serial killer], a policeman's son, organised the city's prostitution business, providing under-age girls for sadomasochistic orgies at a courthouse in the city and at a chateau owned by the town council." *) July 21, 2004, The Daily Mail, 'Was Jo killed by a sex cult? For 14 years Leeds student Joanna Parrish's murder in France has been unsolved. Now the arrest of a serial killer poses the chilling question: was she murdered by a cabal of high powered men obsessed with rape and torture?' (longer extracts can be found in the column on the left): "The case for the conspiracy theorists was further strengthened in 1984 when a horribly mutilated woman escaped from a house in a village close to Auxerre and led police to a cellar where she and two others had been imprisoned for up to three months and subjected to appalling abuse. A list of 50 people, rumoured to include several French 'notables' who had paid various rates to torture and abuse the women, was discovered by police. It would later go missing from a courtroom in Auxerre, and only Claude Dunand, a factory worker and his wife, Monique - who both lived in the house - were jailed." *) April 25, 2005, Time Magazine - Europe, ' A Town Called Angers; How one community in rural France is coping with allegations of systematic sexual abuse of children': "Police are still searching for a group of men, who the children say arrived at Franck V.'s apartment in suits and ties, with their faces hidden behind masks — a striking contrast to the largely uneducated, unemployed defendants who fill the courtroom in rumpled sweatshirts and scuffed sneakers. Franck V.'s lawyer Pascal Rouiller says he is convinced the men were part of a sophisticated network of pedophiles who tapped into Angers' underbelly as word of the prostitution ring spread. They brought in customers who "had money, made appointments, and were punctual," Rouiller says. One man paid €458 for one sexual assault on a child, and Franck V.'s wife, Patricia, regularly took in about €1,200 a month. "Franck had telephone calls from the whole of France," says Rouiller. "He's a poor miserable man with no intelligence. He had no reason to have contact with people in Montpellier or Lille." Much like the pedophilia scandal that rocked Belgium in 1996, Angers is awash in suspicions that a wider ring of wealthy customers was among the child rapists, and is still at large." |
| [36] | We could see examples of this in the Franklin case, the Mirano case (VM1) while X1 also discussed this subject extensively. Additionally, take this report from England: April 1, 1990, Sunday Times, 'Satanic ring forces families to suffer from a hell on earth; Sexual abuse': "At the age of eight, Kevin's father had introduced him to a group of men who performed rituals involving sexual and sadistic acts. He talked about watching pornographic videos and being made to take part in them. He said he had been drugged and that, on occasions, animals were sacrificed he had been warned that a similar fate awaited him if he ever told anyone what was happening. Charlie named 20 other children who were sometimes present. He also named some of the adults, giving a list which included a teacher from his own school. By the time Charlie revealed this to his mother he was 11 years old and deeply involved so much so that he had become a recruiter, bringing in other children in exchange for money." |
| [37] | Discussed in detail by X1. Trying to get new children to voluntarily have homosexual sex is very popular ("You're a big girl now, don't be childish", etc.), just as overwhelming young, extremely neglected children (like X1) with presents and attention, soon followed by the abuser sexually touching the victim. If the child allows the touching, i.e. "volunteers" (after given a few hints by the abuser, thinks: "this person is so good to me, why am I so childish or selfish to refuse him something as simple as sex?"), the game continues with regular beatings for "underperforming" with accusations that as worthless the child already is, he or she can't even satisfy the one person who truly "loves" him or her. There are several variations, but this is approximately how the initial psychological game works. Often, in later stages everything is just about avoiding the pain or not having to deal with the guilt of someone else being tortured for the mistakes you made. Depends on the type of network a child ends up in. In case of X1, a pretty sophisticated one. |
| [38] | *) First of all, there are a few problems with classifying "abducted" children. A number of questions that could be asked: - How often has a child gone missing before? Is the child just running away again? Did it voluntarily go to a particular person or group who might have persuaded it? - How long should the child be missing before it's added it to 'missing persons' statistics? (about 90% of children reported missing resurface within 72 hours; only about 2-3 percent are long term missing children (gone for over a month) or children who were found dead) - In case the child is found dead, was it really kidnapped or just simply murdered? - Was the child abused and maybe often taken places against her will by a network only to be returned later on? (apparently very common, judging from statements of children who ended up in sexual abuse networks) *) However, just because it can be challenging to categorize missing persons, the authorities apparently are not interested in doing so. As with Belgium, Britain also doesn't have a (reliable) centralized database on missing children. October 31, 2001, The Daily Mail, 'How 100,000 children go missing every year': "A child goes missing in Britain every five minutes, according to a report today. Some 100,000 children disappear every year, says the study by the charity Parents and Abducted Children Together. It warns that the figure, based on police reports, may even be an underestimate because there are no reliable national statistics on the issue. The charity is pressing the Government to set up a department within the Home Office to centralise information on missing children and develop a national policy on the problem. Alternatively, it wants a national information and help centre devoted solely to the disappearance of youngsters who have run away, been 'thrown away' by their families or who have been abducted by a parent or a stranger. While the majority of the youngsters are eventually found and reunited with their families, they are at risk while missing, said the charity's founder Lady Meyer. She said it was an 'absolute scandal' there were no nationally gathered statistics on missing children. 'Without reliable data, we cannot know the nature of the problem, which makes it impossible to create policies to protect our children. 'It is shocking that in this country we have statistics for the number of dogs that go missing every year but not for the number of children who go missing. 'One estimate, which we gathered from reports made to police, is that 100,000 children go missing each year but the problem could be much bigger than that.'... Lady Meyer said: 'We need to follow the example of the U.S., which conducted a study in 1990. 'Because they have detailed statistics on how many children go missing and why, the U.S. government has been able to develop policies to protect youngsters.' [do they?]" *) There's another reason, of course, for unreliable statistics and that is complicity of Justice officials in these child abuse networks. The Veronique Dubrulle case, described by X1, seems to one example in which a girl's death from sexual- and other physical abuse was labeled by complicit doctors as a "natural" (chronic disease). The same thing appears to have happened in the following case: June 3, 2003, The Guardian, 'Toulouse officials ordered murder, says serial killer': "Alègre, a policeman's son, organised the city's prostitution business, providing under-age girls for sadomasochistic orgies at a courthouse in the city and at a chateau owned by the town council. In a letter from his cell sent to TV presenter Karl Zero at the weekend, Alègre said that the former prostitutes, known as Patricia and Fanny, were telling the truth about the murders of two other prostitutes which they had witnessed but which he had previously denied... A vice squad detective allegedly assured Alègre, who worked in the police canteen, that [one of] the murder[s] would be classified as suicide..." |
| [39] | March 18, 2003, Zembla (Dutch TV), 'De X-dossiers - Part II': "Between 1973 and 1996, 43 children have disappeared without a trace in Belgium, and sometimes were found back murdered; disappearances and murders which have never been solved." |
| [40] | *) August 26, 2006, Daily Telegraph, 'How Natascha was robbed of her childhood' (this report is apparently referring to alleged long term kidnappings for sexual abuse): "Every year, thousands of children go missing without trace - 200 of them in Austria alone, a staggering 1,850 in Italy. In Belgium, where Marc Dutroux abducted and killed four female victims, 1,022 disappear annually; and in Britain, around 400. Experts fear that hundreds are being held in private prisons." *) 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-Dossiers', p. 373: "On February 13, 1997, Bille writes to all the district attorney's offices in the country, with the simple question of how many unsolved murders (or disappearances) there have been on persons younger than 30 years old... Eight district attorney's offices will simply leave the letter unanswered: Antwerp, Mechelen, Turnhout, Tongeren, Liege, Leuven, Charleroi and Namen... This is the whole of answers, late April 1997 [only one taken up here]... Brussels: 51 murders since 1991 and 3.000 disappearances, among them 1.300 minors... How broad the interpretation abilities of the magistrates can be, shows from the results coming from Brussels [which is many, many times higher than the other cities, even when taking into account the size of the population]... At a certain point in Brussels, by way of silent protest - 'Our resources are too limited' - dozens of old dossiers are reopened and normal daily activities are almost ceased. By way of demonstrating, the district attorney's office appears to benefit from interpretating a question about missing persons as maximalistic as possible. Still, this fact - 1,300 missing children in Brussels - suddenly makes the fax of X1 a lot less insane." |
| [41] | *) July 1, 2001, The Independent on Sunday, 'An invisible death': "Why do some children who are killed become media icons, while others are forgotten or ignored? For a story to catch on, it seems, it has to echo some deep-seated fear [abduction by strangers]... Child homicide is something which most of us would rather not think about, but it happens every week. In the six months from June to November last year - the months surrounding the deaths of Sarah Payne and Gwen Clapperton's daughter, Daniella Hurst - around 50 children in the UK were murdered, unlawfully killed or died in circumstances which subsequently required special investigation (a Part 8 Case Review) or will be the subject of a trial in the coming months. In July and August 2000 alone, there were over 20 cases of child murder or manslaughter. A handful of these cases had their brief moment of infamy - a photo, a headline with the word "tragedy" - but it's unlikely that you've heard of more than a couple . They're too mundane, too ordinary, to command attention." In a few other articles in British newspapers it was reported that many cases of child deaths involving (sexual) abuse were not classified as such, because doctors and social workers usually want to be 200 percent sure before they dare to bring up this extremely touchy subject. There also were sporadic examples of past murders on street children (a favorite target of abuse networks) going completely unreported. *) December 15, 2002, The Observer, 'Dispatches: There are certain rules in the missing persons game': "It is unlikely you have ever heard of Hannah Williams: the discovery of her body merited only a few lines in the 'news in brief' columns of the newspapers. There were appeals in the local paper, but for a long time it was thought that Hannah had simply run away and would probably come back. Somehow, the national media just never got hooked on the case. There are all sorts of reasons for this, many of them wrapped up in issues about class - Hannah just wasn't the right sort of missing girl to grab the public's attention. Her mum was a single parent and Hannah had gone missing before. Police in London are already overwhelmed with missing runaways from broken homes. The search for Hannah wasn't helped either by a positive sighting by a friend, who said that Hannah was still alive long after she had probably been killed. In recent years, missing persons have become a commodity to be weighed up and assessed for their media potential and police officers have begun to talk about them as such... Hannah Williams wasn't the only one to be forgotten. There has been no national media campaign about Daniel Nolan, a 14-year-old who went missing on New Year's Day 2002 from the seaside town of Hamble, in Hampshire... His fishing gear was found where he had left it, but Daniel had disappeared. He was described by his parents as a mature and responsible boy whose disappearance was completely out of character. On the surface, it seems Daniel was equally as worthy of attention as Milly Dowler, but didn't get it because of his gender. Christine and Peter Boxall know this all too well. Their son, Lee, was 15 when he went missing on the way to a football match in south London in September 1988. He was one of the first cases to be taken up by the Missing Persons Bureau, as it was then. There have been no sightings in 14 years, despite numerous local appeals. His father said: 'I often think if it had been our daughter it may well have been very different. Even today, boys of 15 rarely get publicity because boys can look after themselves, can't they?' There are certain rules in the missing persons game. Don't be a boy, don't be working class, don't be black. As for persistent runaways, children in care or teenagers with drug problems. . . forget it. Milly Dowler was the perfect missing person: a beaming photogenic angel from a comfortable, middle-class home... One spokeswoman from the southeast London police area who dealt with the Hannah Williams case told me that her mother 'wasn't really press- conference material' and that the girl's background made it difficult to build a campaign around her..." |
| [42] | In the 1980s in the United States talk about MPD (DID) became almost immediately synonymous with ritual abuse and Satanism. Examples are the McMartin-, Jonestown-, Aquino-, Franklin-, Finders-, Children of God-, and numerous other, smaller cases. Also in the early Dutroux dossier there are several examples of victims claiming that MPD is deliberately created and maintained in victims, and again this is tied to ritual abuse and usually Satanism. |
| [43] | February 2003, Merck website, 'Dissociative Identity Disorder' http://www.merck.com/mmhe/sec07/ch106/ch106d.html |
| [44] | The False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was founded in 1992, several years after a wave of reports in the United States and Britain about large-scale child abuse, ritual abuse and Satanism. The main founders, Pamela and Peter Freyd, were accused by their daughter, a Ph.D. in psychology working at a prestigious psychology institute, of child abuse. She also claimed her father had been abused himself as a child. The FMSF publishes a newsletter. Certain members of the FMSF are consulted by newspapers to "objectify" stories of child abuse while others make their living by defending individuals accused of child abuse around the country. The FMSF is closely linked to certain organized skeptics organizations as CSICOP. |
| [45] | A summary can be found in False Memory Syndrome Foundation appendix. A lot of the intelligence/mind control information has come from Dr. Colin A. Ross, M.D., who received many FOIA documents pertaining to US government mind control research. |
| [46] | Juni 1998, Harald Merckelbach for Skepter, edition 11, 'Opkomst en ondergang van Getuige X1' ('Rise and downfall of X1'). Of course, the whole tone of the article is condescending and "sceptic" from the very first sentence and a number of disinformation arguments are featured: the Oliver Trusgnach case (name spelled wrongly as Trusnach), the fact that X1 was forced to participate in the abuse and murder (although Merckelbach forgets to clearly mention X1 was coerced and that this is a very common tactic), examples that De Baets manipulated (all proven false two years after this article appeared) or arguing that media sensation was the cause of X1 initially being taken seriously by some of the newspapers. As expected, X1's psychological disorder is exploited as much as possible (X1 "suddenly remembered" all kinds of details about her past with the "help" of psychiatrist) and the old criticism on the ultra-right is just a conspiracy theory. There are other exploits used by Merckelbach, but you get the point. http://www.skepsis.nl/x1.html |
| [47] | February 2003, Merck website, 'Dissociative Identity Disorder' http://www.merck.com/mmhe/sec07/ch106/ch106d.html |
| [48] | 1998, Regina Louf, 'Zwijgen is voor daders - De getuigenis van X1' ('Silence is for perpetrators - The testimony of X1'), p. 299: "This book first began to take form in July 1988, when for the first time I wrote down in a notebook with pencil my memories and nightmares. I found out that I had different styles of handwriting, and that each of those handwritings belonged to very distinct parts of ´me´. That was very frightening, even more so because I often couldn´t remember what I had written down, and when I reread the pages I stumbled across long-repressed memories. I hadn't really forgotten the facts, they had only been distributed over different personalities, each with its own traumas... In a timeframe of six weeks I wrote down large parts of the book that ultimately would end up with the BOB..." As for the alters having the same age as when they were created, see the quote belonging to reference 52. |
| [49] | Ibid., p. 122-123. |
| [50] | Ibid. Described in various locations in the book. |
| [51] | Ibid., p. 250-251 |
| [52] | Ibid., p. 206-207 |
| [53] | Ibid. Also all over the official testimonies of different X witnesses. |
| [54] | Ibid. Also all over the official testimonies of different X witnesses. |
| [55] | Ibid., p. 145-146 |
| [56] | PV 116.990, November 13, 1996, summary of an interview with X1: "Weinstein had brought a snake that one used on Christine and X1..." PV 116.990, November 18, 1996, summary of an interview with X1: "Bouty is going to look for a snake... Weinstein brought the snake." |
| [57] | DVD 3 FILE NUMBERS |
| [58] | PV 118.869, November 20, 1996. |
| [59] | See 'the accused' appendix for more information on the Dolo, which has been discussed in books as 'The X-Dossiers' and 'The Nihoul Dossier' and named by victim-witnesses as X1, X2 and Nathalie W. There's a lot of direct (testimonial) evidence and circumstantial evidence about a paedophile network having surrounded Nihoul and various visitors of the Dolo. Example: 2004, Herwig Lerouge, 'Het Dossier Nihoul', p. 123-124 (PV 22.820, October 11, 1996): "I brought Mr. Nihoul to Etterbeek to a house in the Atrebatenstreet. He invited me out to the first floor because he only wanted to pay inside. When I came in, there were three girls of twelve, thirteen years, almost without clothes, only in a nightgown. I saw they were very young because they didn't have any pubic hair. Two of them were foreign, the third I don't know. In the room there also were two men, dressed. Nihoul forced me to take off my clothes and when I refused he threw me out with my shirt and my coat... it certainly was Nihoul... I am also certain that it was the house in the Atrebatenstreet [Les Atrebates club]." |
| [60] | 2004, Herwig Lerouge, 'Het Dossier Nihoul', p. 125-126: "According to Max, Doudou was a contact of an ex-teacher of the Adolphe Max-atheneum. Doudou and the teacher 'made paedophile videos', he claimed. He would have heard Doudou and Nihoul repeatedly talk 'about cages for children, to make them suffer, and about videos imported from the United States on which black children were tortured before being burned in the cage. That was some time in 1992-'93'. 'Dolores Bara knows all about it', he added to that. Has this been checked out? An anonymous letter to the King's prosecutor Bourlet confirms that 'Vanhuyneghem often went to Thailand and said you could find boys there." 'I know that Nihoul is not a paedophile', says Max. He is a notorious gangster, without morals, who can be bought for little. He even says that 'Nihoul has learned to kidnap children, to earn money'. He even tried it in the Dolo, but Forgeot [co-owner of the Dolo] said: 'That's not the way you do that'." Originally from PV 116.166, December 19, 1996. |
| [61] | Ibid. |
| [62] | Examples: *) October 2, 1975, Long Beach Press-Telegram, 'Porno death films probed' *) October 2, 1975, Vermont Bennington Banner - 'Death on porno film not fake' *) October 2, 1975, Winnipeg Free Press, 'Film called ultimate obscenity' *) October 3, 1975, Charleston Daily Mail, 'Actress actually murdered' *) October 4, 1975, The Post Crescent, 'Sex-death films believed produced in Argentina' |
| [63] | October 2, 1975, Long Beach Press-Telegram, 'Porno death films probed: "... the films, which Horman said were made in South America, possibly Argentina... One film was reported to show sex acts between an actress and one or more actors. Then, according to the reports, a knife is produced and the actress, unaware of the true nature of her role, is stabbed to death and dismembered." |
| [64] | *) Questioning of Jean-Paul Raemaekers during his 1995 trial: "- Why did you tape those [rape] scenes? - You could earn a lot of money doing that. You could also exchange those videos. - With who? - That happened within a large paedophile network that is active in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. I myself was only a small link. - Who were the others? - I do not wish to testify about that." Two other examples of talk about a network and the swapping of pictures, video and children: *) August 19, 1996, The Times, 'Belgian case throws light on global scourge; Murder': "In Britain alone police estimate that there are 200 paedophile rings that allow people to swap child pornography and even children... Within the rings, paedophiles exchange photographs, contact magazines and addresses. Chief Superintendent Brian Mackenzie, president of the Police Superintendents' Association, said yesterday: "They operate like any other special interest group. Networks and rings form by word of mouth. "Individuals will exchange pornography and quite often they will pass compliant juveniles between groups. The whole thing spreads out and it is difficult for the police to break down." The networks can be very complex and in one case children who had run away from homes had been lured to London by a "safe" name and address, forced into a paedophile ring and, as they got older, were made to abuse recent arrivals. The aim was to turn the children into perpetrators, making it less likely that they would complain to the police... Children have been kidnapped by paedophile rings who make and sell videos featuring child sex abuse." *) January 19, 2002, The Independent, 'In Foreign Parts: Seaside town slowly reveals its macabre secrets': "The little girl [allegedly] was brought by a distinguished-looking Belgian in his 50s to the apartment of Thierry D, a brutal man in his 30s who collected human skulls and allegedly belonged to a large paedophile sex network... The evidence, including detailed statements by children, suggests that Thierry and Myriam D, and other impoverished parents, sold their children's services to wealthier people, including the bailiff, a shopkeeper to whom they owed money and the 64-year-old priest. All are among those arrested. This allegedly developed into organised sex parties with children in a farm house near Ypres in Belgium. The sessions were filmed for sale as videos by a French man and his son, who owned a clandestine video business in Ostend." |
| [65] | July 29, 1990, Sunday Times, 'Teenager 'confessed' to filming snuff movie' |
| [66] | July 9, 1989, Sunday Times, 'Rape expert: the witness they never call; Ray Wyre': "What Wyre knows about the distorted male mind is not pleasant. He learnt most, he says, from the four months he spent on a Churchill Fellowship in the United States with the FBI, studying the treatment of rapists and murderers and their victims. From that experience, he can say that he has seen everything including films of killings and mutilations which the murderers themselves took. Most of us, he says, are quite unaware of what actually is done to victims; we are protected from the horrible truth by the limits of what is printable." |
| [67] | False [Abuse] Allegations Action Scotland: "Wyre’s opinions were further questioned regarding snuff videos. He is quoted as having viewed snuff films first hand in America. Apparently however, when contacted, he denied having seen one, and claimed that what he saw was instead a sophisticated simulation. Though he insists that the FBI did have such films in their possession and claimed that they were available in England, both the FBI and Scotland Yard dispute this." http://www.faascotland.co.uk/A%20live%20Wyre.htm |
| [68] | April 8, 1997, The Toronto Star, 'Film alleges pedophiles killed boys': "Dutch police will be among the television viewers today of a British documentary that reports a pedophile ring in Amsterdam and nearby Hoofddorp videotaped the snuff deaths of homeless boys. It's not the first time Dutch police have heard the allegation, but investigations in 1990 and 1993 yielded no concrete result." |
| [69] | April 6, 1997, The Mail on Sunday, 'Briton hunted over 'snuff movies'': "A British man is being hunted in connection with the suspected killing of young boys for so-called 'snuff movies'... Detectives, who identified John from pornographic videos seized in raids on the homes of sex offenders, were already searching for him... Three of the men have independently claimed direct knowledge of the production of paedophile 'snuff' movies, but all deny involvement. One told police that he saw five videos in which boys died after being sexually abused. He has identified a house in Hoofdorp, near Amsterdam, where he says some of the videos were made and has led police to a lake where he says he was told the bodies of the five boys were dumped." |
| [70] | April 8, 1997, The Toronto Star, 'Film alleges pedophiles killed boys': "The British newspaper The Guardian on Saturday detailed one video known as the Bjorn Tape, allegedly made in Amsterdam in 1990, which begins with a man entering a room carrying the limp figure of a young boy, his hands tied and his head covered with a hood." Judging by the description of this movie, it could easily have been faked. It was later reported by British and Dutch sources that the boy in the tape was found alive. |
| [71] | June 29, 1997, Mail on Sunday, 'Outrage as snuff film pervert is free early': "The release of 32-year-old Warwick Spinks, who claims to have been involved in the murder of several children while making 'snuff' movies, has raised a storm of protest... It was a lurid confession from Spinks in an ITV documentary last April that sparked an investigation into the making of `snuff' movies in the Dutch town of Hoofddorp. In a conversation recorded by undercover police in Amsterdam, Spinks offered to supply a video in which a 10-year-old boy was killed, and said an associate had seen a boy die during the making of another film. Scotland Yard and Dutch police launched an inquiry which failed to find any evidence, but they are furious that Spinks, whose seven-year sentence was reduced to five on appeal, is being released so soon... Spinks was convicted of abducting a child, taking indecent photographs and a serious sexual assault in Feb-ruary 1995. His 14-year-old victim, described by Spinks as a rent-boy, had been on the run from a children's home in the North of England. Judge John Gower QC said Spinks had picked up the boy before taking a number of indecent photos during a gay sex session. Spinks later drugged his victim and took him to Amsterdam where he was sold to a homo-sexual brothel." |
| [72] | November 27, 2000, The Guardian, ''Britain's paedophiles: When sex abuse can lead to murder: Award-winning journalist Nick Davies concludes a series looking at the evils of paedophilia by confronting the grim mysteries of snuff movies: Today: The Amsterdam connection' |
| [73] | September 28, 2000, Aftonbladet (Sweden), 'Pedofil-företag mördade barn inför kamera' ('Pedophile company murdered children in front of camera'): "The Pedophile network had branched out over the whole world. But the center was located in Murmansk, in North Russia... At the same time it is revealed that several large financial companies are involved..." http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/0009/28/pedo.html |
| [74] | October 1, 2000, The Observer, 'Special Investigation: British link to 'snuff' videos' |
| [75] | September 28, 2000, Aftonbladet (Sweden), 'Pedofil-företag mördade barn inför kamera' ('Pedophile company murdered children in front of camera'): "The Pedophile network had branched out over the whole world. But the center was located in Murmansk, in North Russia... At the same time it is revealed that several large financial companies are involved... The Russian bosses in the organization so far revealed are these three: Dmitri Kuznetsov, 31, was arrested in Moscow in February, but was released shortly thereafter after the Russian parliament passed an amnesty law to reduce the number of internees. Valeri Ivanov, the one who is now in prison and who, himself, appears in many recordings where he torments young children. Andrej Valeri Minaev, formerly of the Soviet military, is the official owner of a company that primarily distributes TV video cassettes. He was also released after the amnesty... More than 1700 persons are suspected of having bought child pornography over the Internet...Eight of the arrested yesterday are Italians, but one is a Russian citizen. Of the Italians, one is a civil servant within the health care ministry, married without children. Another is a business leader, and a third is a civil servant in Milano. Irreproachable citizens whom no one would suspect... The pictures are unbearable for normal people to watch. Here are prolonged rape sequences with children begging to be spared. They are abused until they faint. Then they are murdered before the cameras... Yes, there are even scenes of actual autopsies on young people... In the 'product catalog' of the pedophiles were pictures of a 10-year-old girl who had been killed by hanging. A five-year-old girl with a grimace of pain as she is raped. An adult is killed by gradual crushing. The worst images are labeled 'necros pedo' and showed children being killed during abuse. Such cassettes sold for (US) $20,000. The arrested persons had specifically asked for assurances that the children actually were killed and that it was not simulated by trick photography... The scandal dominated the magazines and broadcasts on Thursday, after broadcasts with child pornographic pictures had been shown on TV during prime time. The opposition immediately demanded that the manager (Mr. Rais) of the state-owned TV company be dismissed. The matter was discussed in the chamber of deputies. " What has happened is absolutely unforgivable," said the leader of the opposition and the media boss Silvio Berlusconi, whose TV station chose not to show the images, according to Reuters. The newspaper La Republica devoted three pages to the operation, which has international branches. In an editorial, the competitor Corriere della Serra wrote that the extent of the affair is horrifying. "We could never have imagined that thousands of wealthy, cultivated people in the midst of society are taking pleasure in watching small children being tortured and killed." The special division of the police in Neapel for Internet-related crimes said that about 600 homes were searched in morning raids on Wednesday. According to the police, the key persons are three Russians who have kidnapped children from orphanages, amusement parks and [city] parks. Thereafter, the children were filmed as they were subjected to severe sexual abuse." http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/0009/28/pedo.html |
| [76] | October 1, 2000, Associated Press, 'Director Quits Over Child Porn': "The news director of Italian state television's primary station resigned Sunday, taking the blame for allowing graphic images of child pornography to air in a prime-time report. The broadcast, seen by more than 7 million people, stunned the country. In the ensuing uproar, RAI-TV came under attack from the Vatican, the Parliament, the president, the prime minister, politicians on both the left and the right, family and child advocates and a host other news organizations." There were no details on what was actually shown, but it's hard to imagine actual uncensored snuff or hard rape extracts were aired. |
| [77] | I have not been able to find any news reports while going through the archives of many hundreds of US newspapers, including the New York Times and Washington Post. At the very least, the Russian pedophile and snuff ring has been severely underreported in the US. |
| [78] | There were reports about the Morkhoven Workgroup's discovery in German, Dutch, Belgian, British and possibly other newspapers. Following is an excerpt from a British newspaper: July 18, 1998, The Independent, 'Dutch porn ring exploited two-year-olds': "Dutch Police were investigating allegations yesterday that an international child pornography ring exploited toddlers as young as two and distributed their images worldwide via the Internet... The inquiry follows a report by a Belgian anti-[child]pornography group, Morkhoven, that it found thousands of computer discs in a flat in the Dutch seaside town of Zandvoort. The discs were loaded with pornographic pictures of children, the Dutch current affairs television programme NOVA reported. Morkhoven showed some of the images to the programme makers, who decided they were too disturbing to broadcast. A spokeswoman for NOVA said that the correspondent responsible for the report was in contact with the Dutch police, and added that all the alleged evidence was with Morkhoven... But the Berliner Morgenpost which has closely followed the case, reported in April about accusations of sloppy work by German and Dutch police. After much public outcry, Berlin prosecutors met in late April with Marcel Vervloesem, a private detective with Morkhoven. Mr Vervloesem said he gave the police extensive evidence and the names of two previously unknown suspects." |
| [79] | September 13, 1998, The Independent, 'No kind of hero; Marcel Vervloesem claims he cracked a child pornography ring. But should we believe him?': "Ulrich says he'll give Vervloesem more material when he gets back to Holland - he's got a secret store under the floorboards in his living room... Later he [Vervloesem] informs the police about the secret stash and on 28 June they return to the flat, carry out a thorough search, and find computer records under the floorboards, including a list of 300 names which is said to amount to an international Who's Who of suspected paedophiles. It includes Warwick Spinks, who was released from prison in Britain last July after being convicted of drugging and kidnapping a 14-year-old boy, and is now believed to be in Prague, and Lothar Gandolf, a notorious German paedophile." |
| [80] | Ibid. 1) Zandvoort is near Hoofddorp and Amsterdam 2) Warwick Spinks allegedly was deeply involved in the British-Amsterdam abuse and snuff network. |
| [81] | Ibid. The Lothar Gandolf connection. Hoogwaardigheidsbekelders. *) February 9, 2003, www.stelling.nl, 'Van Estoril naar Zandvoort' ('From Estoril to Zandvoort'): "[Manuel Schadwald] would have worked for a while in a Rotterdam boys brothel of the now in Schiedam-living Lothar Gandolf, who also made "his" pupils available to all kinds of escort services. Not seldom to so-called men of standing." http://www.stelling.nl/followup/axel.html *) 2005, Werkgroep Morkhoven (their translation): "Native from Thüringen in Germany, he had a perfect landing place between the Polish border and Holland. He soon collected enough funds to purchase his first brothel, and settled in Rotterdam. Lothar developed a concept of child prostitution with triple convolution: he supplied customers of sadists and he resold the children according to their endurance, either with his fellow-members, or to the producers of pornographic imageries. It required an important bearing, which made the fortune of the children’s frontier runners and filled the “softer” brothels at the less risk for their directors. “When one arrives at the Polish border”, he said, “You just have to release the child before the bridge, ask him to cross by foot and collect him after the boarder”. Three children had succeeded to runaway from his brothel in 1993. At the police station as they were shown pictures, they had recognized Manuel Schadwald; 11 years old Berliner a whom, according to the German authorities, had runaway. Thus began an operation widespread in Europe and which consisted in finding the customers before saving the children. Three officers reported to have seen Lothar with a boy they believed to be Manuel but they had not intervened, as they were afraid to "endanger the operation". It took another eighteen months of tortures, rapes and kidnapping of runaway children, before the Dutch police released around fifty of them from Lothar’ brothel. Manuel was no more among them." http://groups.msn.com/WerkgroepMorkhoven/general.msnw?action=get_ message&mview=1&ID_Message=3003 |
| [82] | January 29, 2005, Jan Boeykens (chair of the Morkhoven Workgroup) in an article published on Indymedia: "It is possible that the Kennemerland police blocked the investigation, because at the time a videotape was found in the flat of Ulrich on which S., a contact of the Dutch royal house, could be seen. According to Bart van W. of 'Kleintje Muurkrant' S. also appeared in a case in which certain judicial people were involved with children. The information from this story closely matches with the things the Morkhoven Workgroup already found out in this area." http://www.stelling.nl/divers/boeykens.html |
| [83] | 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-Dossiers', p. 390: "Only several years later it turns out that one floor above the cafe the post office box of a Dutch porn company is located. A completely innocent company, Antwerp detectives will conclude one year later. What they apparently don't know is that the name of the company later appears in the personal agenda of Robby van der Plancken, the Belgian who was brought in connection with the murder of his friend Gerrie Ulrich in the summer of 1998. In Holland this murder leads to the Zandvoort-scandal. In the apartment of a until then purportedly respectable citizen the police discovered more than 50,000 computer images of the most terrible forms of child abuse. Among the cd-roms of Ulrich there also are forms to 'order' children - baby's also, but in that case it's a bit more expensive. In the forms it is specified what the 'customer' can do with the child, how far he can go... In the Zandvoort-dossier there also are payment orders showing that Ulrich until just before his death regularly deposited large sums of money in the accounts of the porn company above cafe Les Routiers." |
| [84] | May 3, 2004, Jan Boeykens for Werkgroep Morkhoven, 'Foto's Dutroux-slachtoffers in The Sprout' ('Pictures Dutroux-victims in The Sprout') http://groups.msn.com/werkgroepMorkhoven/youcanhelp1.msnw Also: April 19, 2004, Morkhoven Workgroup, 'The Sprout': "Several years ago a Belgian and a European member of Parliament could see a similar movie at the home of Marcel Vervloesem of the Morkhoven Workgroup. On the video one could see how a crying four year old girl was raped in the doctor's cabinet by a criminal dressed as a doctor, while a 12 year old girl had to play nurse and came in with the necessary instruments on a platter... The videos are very expensive (up to 30,000 euros a piece) and primarily find their way to pedocriminal networks." http://groups.msn.com/WerkgroepMorkhoven/thesproutnl1.msnw |
| [85] | Details on the intimidation and "accident" of Gina Pardaens-Bernaer can be found in the following books: - 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-Dossiers' - 2004, Herwig Lerouge, 'Het Dossier Nihoul: De knoop in het proces-Dutroux' ('The Nihoul Dossier: The knot in the Dutroux trial') - 2004, Douglas De Coninck, 'Dode Getuigen - Dertig mensen die niet zullen spreken op het proces Dutroux' ('Dead witnesses - Thirty people who will not speak at the Dutroux trial') *) Of course, the Morkhoven Workgroup has also discussed Pardaens' intimidation and death in detail. |
| [86] | Ibid. More details can be found in 'the apparently assassinated' appendix. |
| [87] | 2004, Herwig Lerouge, 'Het Dossier Nihoul: De knoop in het proces-Dutroux' ('The Nihoul Dossier: The knot in the Dutroux trial'), p. 192. According the author, Jean Denis Lejeune made this comment on ZDF (German) television on January 30, 2001. It appears to be a reference to the deaths of Francois Reyskens (1995) and Bruno Tagliaferro (1995) and his wife (1998). This comment is entirely plausible, because on other occasions the parents of Julie have claimed there's a cover up in the Dutroux affair. |
| [88] | See 'the accused' appendix for a number of quotes, including the sources. |
| [89] | Although child support institutions have tried to make estimates, there are no really reliable numbers on children being kidnapped or killed by individual pedophiles and networks. Of the hundreds of thousands of reported missing children in the West each year, only a small percentage is found dead or will go permanently missing. Still, this number amounts to thousands, and with so many child deaths' mislabeled and unreported, the existence of large abuse networks, including many temporary kidnappings, is entirely possible. In addition to the reports below, also take a look at references 38 and 41. *) July 1, 2001, The Independent, 'An invisible death': "In the six months from June to November last year - the months surrounding the deaths of Sarah Payne and Gwen Clapperton's daughter, Daniella Hurst - around 50 children in the UK were murdered, unlawfully killed or died in circumstances which subsequently required special investigation (a Part 8 Case Review) or will be the subject of a trial in the coming months. In July and August 2000 alone, there were over 20 cases of child murder or manslaughter. A handful of these cases had their brief moment of infamy - a photo, a headline with the word "tragedy" - but it's unlikely that you've heard of more than a couple . They're too mundane, too ordinary, to command attention." *) December 29, 2002, Sun-Sentinel: "Social workers cannot say how many of the youngsters who have slipped from their care have ended up dead. However, a national missing children's clearinghouse says 1,500 bodies of unidentified children lie in morgues or unmarked graves, many of whom, experts say, were likely foster children. Another 400 children nationwide, including some missing from state custody, have been gone for decades, raising fears that they, too, are dead. Deaths of missing children are difficult to count for a number of reasons. Overburdened police and social workers say they don't have time to round up runaways, caseworkers do not always file missing person reports when foster children disappear, privacy laws keep details of the children's deaths secret, computer and medical problems can thwart police and medical examiners working on missing children cases." *) 2006, Child Welfare Information Gateway, 'Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities: Statistics and Interventions' (US numbers): "The National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) reported an estimated 1,490 child fatalities in 2004... Many researchers and practitioners believe child fatalities due to abuse and neglect are still underreported. Studies in Colorado and North Carolina have estimated that as many as 50 to 60 percent of child deaths resulting from abuse or neglect are not recorded as such." http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/fatality.cfm *) August 26, 2006, Daily Telegraph, 'How Natascha was robbed of her childhood' (this report is apparently referring to alleged long term kidnappings for sexual abuse): "Every year, thousands of children go missing without trace - 200 of them in Austria alone, a staggering 1,850 in Italy. In Belgium, where Marc Dutroux abducted and killed four female victims, 1,022 disappear annually; and in Britain, around 400. Experts fear that hundreds are being held in private prisons." Additionally, an example of a (thwarted) plan to temporarily kidnap, abuse and torture a young girl, and record this on video (for distribution?): *) May 16, 2007, VRT Nieuws, 'Parket rolt net op tijd pedofielenbende op' ('District attorney's office arrests a pedophile gang just in time): "The Belgian and French police have arrested four pedophiles who in our country wanted to kidnap an underaged girl to sexually abuse her, the district attorney's office confirmed. Four Frenchmen, three men and a woman, had built a cage in an abandoned company building near Rouen to lock up the girl. Next to the cage a camera stood ready, just as sadomasochist attributes. The suspects also had a van with fake license plates." |
| [90] | 1993, Jean-Pierre van Rossem, 'Hoe kom ik van de ground?' ('How do I get off the ground?'), p. 131 |
| [91] | Ibid., p. 138-140 |
| [92] | Following are two brief examples of senior executives of Scotland Yard, Interpol and Europol being aware of the existence of large paedophile networks. *) August 25, 1996, The Observer, 'The Child Abusers: Paedophilia is not the preserve of a few sick individuals. It's a billion dollar business': "Bjorn Eriksson of Interpol believes there are 30,000 paedophiles organised in groups throughout Europe. Many are linked through the Internet, others are on the mailing-lists of pornographic magazines. Some are undoubtedly guilty of the kidnap, trade and murder of children. Scotland Yard's National Criminal Intelligence Service has a database of between 3,000 and 4,000 convicted or suspected paedophiles, many of whom will be part of the wider European network." *) Europol: May 15, 2003, The Times, 'Head jailed over internet paedophile ring': "The head teacher of a Roman Catholic boys' school who was a member of an international internet paedophile ring was jailed for more than five years yesterday... When the network was broken up in an operation involving the FBI, US Customs and Europol, police uncovered thousands of images described as the "worst type ever seen by the investigating officers". More than 80 children from around the world have been identified as victims of abuse as a result of the material, but many more remain unknown." |
| [93] | *) PV 119.244, December 27, 1997 *) 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-Dossiers', p. 371-372 |
| [94] | *) PV 116.020, October 28, 1996. *) PV 151.511, May 14, 1997: "X1 signals that VdBogaert, Vander Elst, Bouty, Nihoul, Bert (Albert & Joost) and Emile Dellaert were present at the murder of Véronique Dubrulle. According to X1, the father is aware of the facts. Jacques Dubrulle is famous in the cinema milieu of Flanders." |
| [95] | PV 116.026, November 13, 1996, 'Observation - Rape of X1 by Dr. de Schrijver': "Drs. de Schrijver and Waele signed the death certificate of Veronique Dubrulle (PV 116.020 rape and murder of Veronique)... Boss of UCO = Hanet... Description of the rape of X1 by only Schrijver when she was 14 years old (1983). Schrijver also raped Clo and Samy on other occasions. He participated in partouzes at the boss of UCO. Waele never raped her - he took girls of 7-8 years." |
| [96] | PV 116.019, October 28, 1996, summary of claims made by X1: "Clo would have passed away between June and December '83." |
| [97] | January 8, 1998, Annemie Bulté and Douglas de Coninck for De Morgen (large Belgian newspaper), 'The girl who gave birth in secret' (translated to English by someone from the Radical party website, and-or possibly the authors): "Thanks to research carried out at "Clo’s" school, the BSR investigators managed to guess who she was. After that, BSR officers Patrick De Baets and Philippe Hupez showed XI a series of class photos from the year 1981-82. XI not only pointed to the photos of Carine Dellaert, but also to another photo. According to XI, it was V. (she gave her first name). She added: "They killed her, too. Clo told me that she was called V." During questioning on 25 October, statement no. 116.018, XI said: "This happened in a house in Ghent. Clo was there, too […] They tortured her with knives and scissors. Someone broke a bottle and rubbed the fragments into her vagina. Then they cut her in various places with razor-blades." After this session of questioning, they no longer knew where they were at the 3rd Criminal Research Section. From a series of twenty photos, XI had managed to pick out two girls who had died shortly afterwards. After further research, the investigators not only came across the old file on the murder of Carine Dellaert, but also information concerning the second young girl. She was, in fact, called V., and had died in the middle of 1983 in Ghent. As regards the list of people present according to XI, some of the details were remarkable. As well as Michel Nihoul and a woman who was arrested in the Dutroux case, XI named her procurer T., the lawyer and the burgomaster mentioned above, and a businessman from western Flanders and his son. XI could not establish any links between all these people, except the fact that she had met them on various occasions at orgies. The investigators carried out research which showed that all the people present had professional links of one sort or another, links that were not apparent at first sight. The name of the man she indicated as Clo’s "procurer" was also remarkable. He had already appeared as a suspect in the old file at the Ghent Public prosecutor’s department. The man was known to the police for a series of sexual crimes." |
| [98] | *) March 11, 2003, Zembla (Dutch TV), 'De X-dossiers - Part I' *) On Laminaria: Medilator company information: "There are two techniques currently in use for dilation of the cervix, laminaria and Hegar rods. The laminaria (seaweed) technique involves insertion of a dry rod into the cervix. Contact with body fluids causes the laminaria to swell ensuing dilatation of the cervical canal." http://www.ofek.org.il/eng/graduate_projects.php?p_id=25 |
| [99] | 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-Dossiers', p. 170: "Apparently because a row had arisen about the fact that he had taken all her belongings, Emile Dellaert later brought back one of the closets of his daughter to the mother. To her great astonishment she noticed there was maternity clothing in it." |
| [100] | March 18, 2003, Zembla (Dutch TV), 'De X-dossiers - Part II', at about 24:30 |
| [101] | *) 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulte and Douglas De Coninck, 'The X-Dossiers', 493-494: "In his official report first sergeant Jan Vincent of the BOB Gent extensively mentions the small wall that clearly isn't there. That it's about a bungalow surrounded by a garden, that he has to acknowledge. X1 also talked about 'some sort of artificial pond, but not a natural pond, a fairly square thing'. That pond, she noted, went around the bungalow like a moat. About the house she said: 'Yes, such a square thing, a kind of brick. With a small fountain.' Vincent has to admit that the pond is there, but then - we cite literally: 'This moat has more of a natural than an artificial look. The water certainly is not a square thing and bricks or a fountain are nowhere to be found.' Strange is that. One inspector says white, the other one says black. What do we do then? We went to take a look ourselves, of course. What turns out? The house in Waarschoot is mostly surrounded by a pond which is as square as square can be. Because of the sprouting of trees and bushes, bumps can be found in the straight line that was intended during construction, but if you keep in mind that X1 said that she had been here in 1983, it is hard not to conclude that the moat then must have formed a perfect square. The house, as any passer-by can determine, certainly has been built with bricks. And what is that there in middle of the garden, right in front of the front door? A fountain! At least a 3 feet high fountain. It might not be a real fountain - no water is coming out - but a white garden sculpture that can even be seen from 100 yards away can impossibly be seen as something else than a fountain." *) February 25, 2004, Herwig Lerouge and Vinciane Convens, Solidaire, interview with Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck: "We were sued several times. Gendarme officer Vincent of the CBO in Gent was one of them. He for instance allowed that an investigation that had been opened in response to testimonies of Regina Louf, was closed. According to him, the house that Regina Louf described did not match at all the house he had visited himself. Regina described an artificial pond and he said it was a natural pond and that the description of Regina therefore was not accurate. In the end, the court decided in our favor and said that our investigation was better than his. That is written black on white. We proved that the house Regina Louf described indeed matches the house that he visited. We even found back the plans for the construction of the artificial pond." |
| [102] | 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulte and Douglas De Coninck, 'The X-Dossiers', p. 435: "Also in the Waarschoot-passage the re-readers alter reality. They state that the house in Waarschoot in 1982 was inhabited 'by persons who have nothing to do with the dossier'. Strange. Anyone who knows the dossier a little, knows that the house next door in the early 1980s was inhabited by the parents of... witness X4." |
| [103] | These details are largely described in the book 'The X-Dossiers' and followed up upon by the Zembla X-dossiers investigation in part II. |
| [104] | See the 'the victim-witnesses' appendix for biographies on Gerard Cok and Charles Geerts. |
| [105] | 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté, and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-dossiers', p. 501-502: "Let's call her Fanny V. It took us two phone calls to find her. Few have known Carine Dellaert as well as she did. They were classmates in the school years 1977-78 and 1978-79 in the town school Gezusters Loveling in the Van Hulthemstraat in Gent. 'We became friends in sixth grade', Fanny says. 'I was eleven or twelve then, Carine thirteen, I believe. What I can tell you, dates from that period.' Fanny has to chuckle when she hears about the conclusions of the District Attorney's office in Gent. In the official reports it is reported that her friend was a hardworking pupil which never had any troubles at home. 'In any case she was a year older than the rest of the class', Fanny says. 'She already had failed one of the lower classes. I looked up to her a lot. I was still a child, she a real woman. She was physically and mentally so much stronger than we. When my mother heard that she had become my best friend, she went to complain about that with the school's management. Because I had said to my mother that Carine regularly had sex with her father and also with other men. 'No, Carine was not happy, not at all. On the playground we sometimes sat silently next to each other the whole time. I felt she was suffering immensely under the situation. She wanted to run away from home, she often spoke about that: "Run away, far away from here." 'She told me that she had to sleep with many men... As far as Fanny remembered, Carine Dellaert told her that this primarily happened at her home. I was still a child, didn't understand anything and didn't ask more questions. What I do remember is that her mother knew nothing about this. I used to ask that all the time: and how about your mother, what does she think? She's always gone, she said...' After the lower school, in 1979, Fanny V. lost contact with Carine Dellaert. 'I never saw her again.' She [Fanny] went to another school and got to know other people there. One of them - we are not making this up - was Regina Louf. 'Regina talked to almost no one', Fanny continues. 'If Regina and Carine knew each other? To me that seems perfectly possible. Regina also had her secret, she was very introvert. If Regina and Carine knew each other through such a circuit it would have been hard for me to find out. At school you only saw the facade. I thought that you could compare them, their attitudes. I have bought the book of Regina, but I'm afraid to read it. I have wanted to start a few times, but there are things in there... it hurts me too much.'" |
| [106] | Ibid., p. 503: "The first childhood friend of Regina Louf who is interviewed in the summer of 1997 is Kristelle M. [PV 103.011, September 1, 1997, BOB Gent, officer Jan Vincent]. She was in the same class in the years 1983-84 and 1984-85... '[Regina] sometimes disappeared from school in the afternoon', Kristelle remembered. If it is true what this woman says, then the re-readers of the dossier Van Hees can fold a boat from the absence register that they saw as 'proof' that Regina Louf impossibly could have been in Brussels in the early evening of February 13, 1984. What Kristelle M. remembered above all, is that she continually talked about sex. She told how she had a relationship with 'an older man'. According to M., the whole class assumed that she was lying. Not Kristelle M. She had seen with her own eyes how this 'older man' picked up Regina after school. And there was something else: Regina at some point told her that she was pregnant of that older man. Kristelle M. also knew that Regina often spoke about a 'female friend with whom she could amuse herself and with whom she often went out in the Boudewijnstraat'. She didn't remember the name of the friend anymore, 'but it could have been Christine, Carine, Caroline or Claudine'. Kristelle M. could also tell that Regina, as a kid of 14, drank alcohol and one morning arrived in class and 'smelled of liquor'. One time she arrived at school with a clearly visible bruise..." |
| [107] | 1998, Regina Louf, 'Zwijgen is voor daders - De getuigenis van X1' ('Silence is for perpetrators - The testimony of X1'), p. 288: "Several days later I came to know that Clo - who, according to the District Attorney's office in Gent maybe never existed and certainly was not Carine - also had classmates who called her Clo. One of them confirms that only very few people knew her under that name, and that she believed me the minute she heard me talk about 'Clo'. Also the description I gave of her was correct. Months later an older woman came to me, who confirmed that another victim I had named had indeed died under suspicious circumstances." |
| [108] | Emile Dellaert's past is largely described in the book 'The X-Dossiers' and in various newspaper reports. |
| [109] | February 18, 1997 note from De Baets to prosecutor Michel Bourlet about PVs 100.071 and 150.099, which were interviews with X1 about Katrien De Cuyper. |
| [110] | PV 150.359, March 1, 1997. |
| [111] | 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté, and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-dossiers', p. 390: "The peculiar thing about the W. family [de Caters] is that they also own property in Knokke-Le Zoute, in the streets where X1 already went to point out houses several months before." |
| [112] | March 18, 2003, Zembla (Dutch TV), 'De X-dossiers - Part II': "[Patricia van der Smissen, lawyer of Regina Louf:] It was observed that he phoned this person more than ten times on a day that he was observed. Maybe he noticed that he was being shadowed. In any case, he often called this gendarme officer. We also know that they were in contact over the internet. And from one day to the next this person is put on the case, after it had already been known that he was in contact with Tony... [BOB officer Rudy Hoskens of De Baets' investigating team:] Then you start asking yourself a few questions, wouldn't you? Then this is not the right person in the right place. I did complain about this to my superiors, but this person kept serving on the same dossier." |
| [113] | June 22, 1999, De Morgen, 'Is dit Katrien De Cuyper?' ('Is this Katrien De Cuyper'): "On page 17 and under number 129 of the second special edition of the Dutch police magazine Research and Information there's a picture of a girl who strongly resembles Katrien De Cuyper... Members of the Morkhoven Workgroup came in the possession of the second edition of Research and Information and handed over copies to the Brussels judicial police, where the Computer Crime Unit will further analyze the picture. 'We also have showed that picture 129 to different persons who know the De Cuyper dossier very well or have known the girl personally', Marcel Vervloesem says. 'We got to hear the same thing again and again: this is Katrien De Cuyper.'" |
| [114] | These details are described in the book 'The X-Dossiers' and the 2003 Zembla X-dossiers investigation, part II. |
| [115] | Werkgroep Morkhoven, 'Katrien De Cuyper: Loog de Antwerpse justitie in deze zaak?': "Interesting in this case is that Leen Nuyts, spokesperson of the Antwerp district attorney's office, at the time reacted in the following manner to the announcement of Marcel Vervloesem: 'Two weeks ago we received from the Dutch justice department a picture which indeed closely resembles Katrien. We have investigated it. We are now for 95 percent sure that that picture shows a still-to-be-identified boy'. Shortly afterwards a picture was published in a certain newspaper which had to show (through the genitals) that the picture on the Zandvoort cd-rom indeed was a 'boy'. Investigative work done by the Morkhoven Workgroup in the mean time showed that it was a photoshop in which the face of Katrien De Cuyper was superimposed on a boys' body. After a scientific investigation in which advanced computer techniques were used, one is able to state with 95% certainty that the by Marcel Vervloesem rediscovered picture indeed shows Katrien De Cuyper." |
| [116] | March 18, 2003, Zembla (Dutch TV), 'De X-dossiers - Part II', at about 24:30 |
| [117] | PV 104.898, April 23, 1998, as filmed in March 18, 2003, Zembla (Dutch TV), 'De X-dossiers - Part II', at about 19:20: "During this hearing, V. acknowledged - after a long talk - the intimate and sexual relation he had with Regina Louf. According to him, it was Regina who took the initiative." A more detailed statement can be found in the 1999 book 'The X-Dossiers', p. 513, including: "At a certain point I indeed had been given a key of the house by Christiane, outside the knowledge of her husband, so I could enter the apartment whenever I wanted." |
| [118] | Unknown PV as filmed in March 18, 2003, Zembla (Dutch TV), 'De X-dossiers - Part II', at about 20:00: "In the end, Christiane confirmed that Regina indeed has had a sexual relationship with Tony... She confirmed that she under pressure of Regina had given a key of the house to Tony." |
| [119] | PV 100.466, February 6, 1998, as filmed in March 18, 2003, Zembla (Dutch TV), 'De X-dossiers - Part II', at about 19:50: "After an open discussion Georges Louf admitted that Tony stopped by much more than he had earlier testified... that she went out with him, that Tony went to pick her up at school." A more detailed statement can be found in the 1999 book 'The X-Dossiers', p. 508. |
| [120] | PV 150.106, February 4, 1997, 'hearing of de Marleen van Herreweghe': "There were sexual contacts in the living room between Tony, X1, her mother and the housekeeper... The female housekeeper was a certain Carine who had 4 children. Carine and Tony gave van Herreweghe the impression that her presence bothered them." |
| [121] | 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté, and Douglas De Coninck, 'De X-Dossiers', p. 347-348. |
| [122] | Ibid., p. 340-341 |
| [123] | PV 116.799, November 6, 1996, 'Designation of places by X2 in Knokke: "The facts happened in villas around Knokke. There's a similarity with the places designated by X1... "Scarsdale" Blinckaertlaan 19 in the Koningbos... Maison Binnenhof 9 or 11 or 13 (not certain)... Elizabethlaan 62... X1 had also designated the Scarsdale villa and the Binnenhof houses. The Tinel hotel and the house of the grandmother of X1 are located facing the Elizabethlaan 62." |
| [124] | When one goes through the Dutroux dossier summary one can read: PV 114.037, September 29, 1996, 'Audition de X1': "She recognizes X2 on a photo. X2 was a victim of pedophile acts right in front of her... She recognizes X2 on photo. She saw her in a club in Brussels with Nihoul. She has been tortured in this club." In this PV X1 identifies several other girls and locations from pictures, but Nathalie W. is nowhere to be found. The problem then is that the authors of 'The X-Dossiers' (p. 143) have cited X1 from the full PV as saying: "Ik have seen her there... with Nihoul in Brussels, yes. But I don't know more than that either. [Abused,] not that I noticed. [so there appears to be a difference between descriptions of X2 and Nathalie]." The authors continue: "The photo they showed her is a childhood picture of Nathalie W., the first victim who came to Neufchateau to testify about the existence of influential child abuse networks in Belgium. Nathalie accused Michel Nihoul of having raped her three times when she was still a kid. She saw him, she says, a number of times in the sexclub Les Atrebates. X1 situated her in the 1982-'83 period. It wouldn't happen often that X1 was correct about a date, but this time apparently she was. At that point, she had never come across Nathalie W. in the buildings of the BOB, she couldn't have seen her. And even if that would have happened, it is very much the question if this would have helped her. There are few, in any, similarities between the Nathalie W. of today and the more than 15 years old picture." That X1 recognized Nathalie W. seems accurate (PV 150.521). The only question is if the author of the summary has mixed up X2 with Nathalie W. Officially, X2 would not begin to testify until November 1996, but sometime in September or October her immediate superior, Michel Clippe (who worked on the Dutroux case), and Bourlet had already found out that she came from an abuse network. So, it could be that they showed a picture of X2 to X1 in an early to see if they could get some quick verifications. What further complicates this case is that X2 also was familiar with Nihoul and the Dolo. PV 118.379, December 12, 1996, 'Interview with X2 - Brabant-Wallon': "X2 regularly went to the Dolo where she met Bouhouche. X2 also met the wife of Bouhouche in the Hilton at the time of a meeting between [Jean] Gol, Philippe Moureaux, Wilfried Martens, VDB, Willy de Clerck, Jean-Michel Nihoul, Delvoye and Karel." |
| [125] | 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulte and Douglas De Coninck, 'The X-Dossiers', p. 435. See note #102. |
| [126] | *) PV 118.575, December 14, 1996, 'Identification of Nathalie Cannoodt by X4': "Presentation of a photo album. X4 recognizes a girl who played in pedophile movies and photo sessions. The girl in question taught X4 a card game. The recognized girl is Nathalie Cannoodt." *) PV 118.576, December 14, 1996, 'Identification of Chantal Storme by X4': "Presentation of a photo album. X4 recognizes a girl who played in pedophile movies and photo sessions... The recognized girl is Chantal Storme." |
| [127] | PV 150.521, March 10, 1997, 'Discordances in the declarations of Waeterschoot': "Waet. recognizes the mother of X4 and gives her first name as well as one of her sisters." |
| [128] | *) PV 100.526, January 9, 1997, 'First interview with Nathalie Cannoodt': "Between her 10th and 14th year her best friend was X1. She went on vacation several times to the grandmother in Knokke. She was forbidden to go to the first floor. The grandmother was very strict... X1 had told her to be in love with Tony, as she saw it. She remembers to have gone to the Decascoop [a cinema] with X1 and Tony in a Mercedes. The mother of X1 was in love with Tony. [Nathalie] broke down in tears when she spoke of her father caressing her chest." *) PV 100.528 January 11, 1997, 'Second interview with Nathalie Cannoodt': "When Tony brought her to the Decascoop with X1, she saw that he kissed X1 and that he stroked her breasts and vagina." |
| [129] | PV 150.521, March 10, 1997, 'Discordances in the declarations of Waeterschoot': "She [Nathalie W.] is recognized by X1 and X4." |
| [130] | 1999, Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulte and Douglas De Coninck, 'The X-Dossiers', p. 143: "Ik have seen her there... with Nihoul in Brussels, yes. But |