Belgium joined relatives in mourning a murdered 7-year-old girl today as television broadcast her funeral live to a nation still haunted by memories of paedophile killer Marc Dutroux.
A white hearse carried a white coffin adorned with white roses to a church service attended by Stacy Lemmens' friends, many also in white, echoing the 300,000-strong "white march" that followed Dutroux's crimes a decade ago.
Lemmens (7) and Nathalie Mahy (10) went missing during a street festival in the eastern city of Liege on June 9th. Their bodies were discovered in a sewer last week. Both had been strangled and the older girl raped.
"Why does God tolerate such horror? Why does he let it happen?" priest Achille Fortemps asked of a congregation including leading Belgian politicians. "Father, we do not yet understand much about your way of loving."
Outside, a few hundred people followed the service on a giant screen.
Belgian authorities have charged a local man, Abdallah Ait Oud, with the girls' abduction. Ait Oud, who says he is innocent, handed himself in before the bodies were found after police said they were looking for him.
Prosecutors have said they will charge him with murder and rape. The results of DNA analysis are due this week.
Belgian media have made repeated references to Dutroux, who was arrested in 1996 and later found guilty of kidnapping and raping six girls. He killed two of them and left two others to starve to death in a makeshift dungeon.
Dutroux's crimes sent shockwaves across Belgium when they came to light, with hundreds of thousands of people marching in protest at what they believed to be police bungling of the investigation.
Police have not, however, come under fire over their handling of these murders. Nathalie was buried Saturday at a service kept private at the insistence of her parents.
