Belgium razes house where child-killer Dutroux buried victims

Demolition crews have begun knocking down a second home used by notorious Belgian child-killer Marc Dutroux in a bid to erase the stain of his crimes, local officials said Tuesday.

Dutroux's "House of Horrors", where he kept kidnapped girls, in the suburbs of Charleroi has already been destroyed.

Now, a second property in the village of Sars-la-Buissiere, where two bodies were found, is to be demolished and grassed over.

"Everything will be destroyed, reduced to rubble, so no more trace remains," the mayor of the Lobbes commune, Lucien Bauduin, told AFP.

The house had been sealed by judicial authorities during the investigation and has now been acquired by the commune.

It was beneath the Sars-la-Buissiere property, under several metres of soil, that the bodies of eight-year-olds Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo were found in 1996 a year after their disappearance.

Dutroux, now 66, had been arrested a few days before the discovery and in 2004 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for kidnapping and raping six young girls and killing four of them.

© 2023 AFP