A BELGIAN police inspector was arrested yesterday as part of the investigation into the kidnapping and sexual abuse of children by convicted rapist Marc Dutroux.
Insp Georges Zicot, who is based in the town of Charleroi, was held at the police station in Neufchateau, also in the southeast of the country. He will be charged with truck theft, insurance fraud and document forgery, the Public Prosecutor, Mr Michel Bourlet, said last night.
Mr Bourlet said there had been searches at three sites yesterday, including one at the Charleroi judicial police headquarters where Insp Zicot worked.
Mr Zicot (45) is a specialist in tackling vehicle theft. Belgian media reported that he had been questioned twice in the past two years about thefts but released both times. He was promoted to chief detective earlier this year.
Mr Bourlet told a news conference last night that two other people had also been arrested. One was Mr Gerard Pignon, the owner of a warehouse where stolen vehicles were allegedly stored. The other was an insurance agent, Mr Thierry de Haan.
Mr Bourlet said the investigation into the vehicle theft ring would be added to the inquiry into the paedophile sex scandal, in which five other people have already been arrested. The prosecutor said the connection was through Bernard Weinstein, an accomplice of convicted child rapist Marc Dutroux the central figure in the scandal.
Weinstein was found dead last weekend alongside the bodies of eight year olds Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo in a house belonging to Detroux, who said they starved to death earlier this year, nine months after being abducted.
Dutroux has admitted killing Weinstein after a disagreement between the accomplices in an affair of truck theft," Mr Bourlet said.
Ms Anne Thily, public prosecutor in the eastern city of Liege where Julie and Melissa lived, said some 50 investigators, including two from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, were now involved in the case.
Yesterday's developments came amid mounting accusations in Belgium that Dutroux had enjoyed some kind of top level protection which helped him to evade detection for so long. The Belgian media were speculating last night that senior officers must have been aware of what was going on. Insp Zicot's family protested his innocence.
Dutroux was arrested on August 13th. Two days later, he led police to Sabine Dardenne (12) and Laetitia Delhez (14), who were incarcerated in a windowless cell in one of his houses in Marcinelle, another suburb of Charleroi.
According to a report in Saturday's Belgian daily De Morgen, police had even been alerted to Dutroux's actions as early as November. The report said police had freed two boys and a girl from another house belonging to Dutroux a day after he and an accomplice had kidnapped them on November 4th.
Dutroux also seemed to pass relatively unnoticed by police despite being released from jail in 1992, halfway through a 13 year term for several counts of kidnapping and raping children.
Dutroux himself underwent a long interrogation overnight during which he was confronted with Mr Michael Diakostavrianos, one of the five other suspects under arrest who include Dutroux's wife, Ms Michele Martin. Dutroux and one of his accomplices, Michel Lelievre, have confessed to kidnapping two teenagers, An Marchal (17), and Eefje Lambreks (19), a year ago, but have not given investigators any concrete leads on the girls whereabouts.
There has been speculation the two were sold into prostitution in Slovakia or the Czech Republic where Dutroux was a frequent visitor.