Outcry in Belgium Over WikiLeaks publications of Dutroux dossier

James Etherington-Smith

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International whistle-blower site WikiLeaks was again at the centre of attention Wednesday as Belgian officials criticised the publication of a confidential dossier on convicted paedophile murderer Marc Dutroux.

WikiLeaks, which last month angered the US administration by publishing 92,000 pages of classified documents on the war in Afghanistan, was found to have posted on its website a 1,235-page account of the Belgian police investigation on Dutroux.

“It is an unfortunate publication because the documents come from a dossier that is still covered by judicial secrecy,” the prosecutor general from the Belgian town of Liege, Cedric Visart de Bocarme, told state broadcaster RTBF.

The material, compiled by prosecutors ahead of Dutroux’ trial in 2004, has actually been on the WikiLeaks website since April 17, 2009, but its presence was only reported Tuesday by Belgian media.

The dossier mentions names, telephone numbers, addresses and bank details of witnesses and people involved in the investigations, including high-ranking Belgian politicians such as Elio Di Rupo, currently leading talks on formation of a new government.

Di Rupo was suspected to have been a member of a paedophile ring linked to Dutroux, but was cleared of all wrongdoing. The WikiLeaks dossier includes testimonies of men claiming to have been abused by Di Rupo as minors, which were later disproved.

“There is some true, some false, some very disparate information here, involving some people who have done nothing wrong, who have simply been mentioned in an investigation and are thus exposed to public contempt, whereas all this material should have remained classified,” Visart de Bocarme said.

The dossier also contains a summary of Dutroux’ interrogations, in which he confesses to police of having kidnapped and raped several young girls.

Jean-Denis Lejeune, the father of one of the victims, told the RTL-TVI channel that “exposing in full view” the contents of the investigations “was not a normal thing to do.”

The Dutroux case remains the biggest scandal in Belgium’s recent history, as it exposed a murky world of child abusers with alleged high-up connections to the country’s establishment, including the police and the government.

The child killer was sentenced to life in 2004 for the kidnapping and rape of six girls and for murdering four of them and an accomplice.

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