ANGER flared up across Belgium yesterday as leaked documents showed a catalogue of past incompetence, bungling and missed opportunities by Belgian police searching for missing children.
Mr Victor Hissel, the lawyer representing the parents of two kidnapped eight year olds, Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo, who were found dead last weekend, said he was lodging a legal demand for access to police files.
"We have to try to find out why Julie and Melissa were not found by police . . . Why police didn't investigate," he said.
The documents, extracts of which were published in several newspapers, indicate a failure by regional police forces to communicate properly with each other or, when they did, to act on the information received.
The reports concern convicted child rapist Marc Dutroux who has admitted abducting young girls and on whose property the two dead girls were found, as well as makeshift cells.
Police were told at the end of 1993 that Dutroux was constructing cells in one of his houses to hold kidnapped children prior to sending them overseas, the extracts stated. No action was taken.
Dutroux, charged on Friday with abduction and illegal imprisonment of children, plunged the nation into shock at the weekend when he led police to the bodies of Julie and Melissa at a house near the city of Charleroi.
The two had been abducted in June 1995 and held for nine months before dying of starvation early this year.
Police twice visited the house where the two girls were being held, but failed to find them.
The documents also show that in July 1995 - a month after the abduction police interviewed Dutroux and took him at his word when he said the building work in the cellar of his house was refurbishment.
In early August last year police were told by an informant that Dutroux had tried to recruit him to kidnap children, explaining that it was simply a matter of putting a hand over their mouths and bundling them into the car.
The price per child, the document extracts say, was between 100,000 and 150,000 francs (£20,00 to £30,000).
Later that month, teenagers An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks disappeared in Ostend. Police failed to launch a hunt for 10 days in the belief the girls were runaways, despite their parents' insistence that this was not the case. Dutroux has admitted to having abducted them.
At the end of August 1995, with Julie and Melissa still held prisoner and An and Eefje now added to the missing persons' list, police searched Dutroux's houses again but found nothing. In December they carried out more searches with the same result.
Belgian television speculated that the only explanations for the litany of mistakes could be failure to communicate between regional police forces, failure to understand the importance of the information or inter force rivalry.
Meanwhile, the detective who led the investigation into Britain's "House of Horrors" serial murders has arrived to help Belgian police in their investigations.
Supt John Bennett of the Goucestershire constabulary met top Belgian police yesterday. He was instrumental in the apprehension of Fred West and his wife Rosemary. Rosemary West was found guilty last of murdering 10 young women.