After the “house of horror”, a place of sequestration in Marcinelle, a second residence of the Belgian criminal Marc Dutroux will be demolished, in Lobbes (south), in agreement with the parents of the girls who were discovered murdered there.
“Everything will be destroyed, reduced to pieces, so that there is no longer any trace”, declared to AFP Lucien Bauduin, mayor of Lobbes, a commune including the village of Sars-la-Buissière where this is located. House.
The demolition site started on Monday, he said, and the objective is to see the grass grow back by the summer on this land acquired by the municipality after being sealed off as part of the ‘judicial investigation.
It was in the garden of this property, buried under several meters of earth, that the bodies of Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo were discovered in August 1996, two 8-year-old girls kidnapped a year earlier in the Liège region ( East).
Marc Dutroux, 66, sentenced in 2004 to life imprisonment, had been arrested on the spot a few days before this discovery.
He was found guilty of raping and kidnapping six girls and young girls whom he had previously abducted, in 1995-96. Four of them were killed, including Julie and Mélissa whom Dutroux left to starve.
The demolition of the Sars-la-Buissière property, “a ruin” according to the mayor, comes after that of the “house of horror”, in Marcinelle, a popular district of Charleroi (south) where Marc Dutroux sequestered his victims in a basement.
At the request of the families of the victims, the cellars will be preserved as part of an urban planning project for a “memorial garden” which should see the light of day by the end of 2023 on this block of houses.
In Sars-la-Buissière, instead of the razed dwelling, “we go more towards a public park, possibly embellished with one or two works of art, but not in the spirit of a memorial”, underlined Mr. Bauduin.
According to the city councilor, this demolition site will be monitored 24 hours a day via video surveillance cameras linked to the local police station, to prevent “slightly malicious tourists from accessing the site and concealing any object”.
The house had been abandoned as it was, with its furniture, in 1996.
14/03/2023 16:32:53 – Bruxelles (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
