Author: TonyGosling
Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2016 5:50 pm (GMT 0)
BEYOND THE DUTROUX AFFAIR: THE REALITY OF PROTECTED CHILD ABUSE AND SNUFF NETWORKS
https://www.isgp-studies.com/belgian-x-dossiers-of-the-dutroux-affair
By: Joël van der Reijden | Date: July 25, 2007
Warning: The information in this article is not suited for anyone below the age of 18, as it involves extreme sexual violence against children. A certain amount of normally-illegal visual evidence (it is censored) has been included.
July 7, 2015 note: The ''Dutroux'' X-Dossiers have virtually NOTHING to do with Dutroux himself. Dutroux had NO connections to the establishment. The details are all explained here.
Countries as The Netherlands and France are dealt with in separate articles. As for British cases, a lot of mainstream news reports from 1990 to 2015 have been included in the right margin of this article. Behind the scores of MPs, lawyers, police officers and petty criminals also in England evidence is repeatedly pointing to the same superclass involvement - with now dozens of police officers and several newsmen complaining that Special Branch has been gagging everyone and destroying evidence for decades when pedophilia involved VIPs. The accusations are right there in mainstream newspapers. Maybe, just maybe, things are really starting to change.
"What you have to understand, John, is that sometimes there are forces and events too big, too powerful, with so much at stake for other people or institutions, that you cannot do anything about them, no matter how evil or wrong they are and no matter how dedicated or sincere you are or how much evidence you have. This is simply one of the hard facts of life you have to face."
Former CIA director, Cercle member and Opus Dei sympathizer William Colby giving advice to his friend Senator John DeCamp, urging him to cease his investigation into the Franklin child abuse affair and to write a book about his experiences ('The Franklin Coverup', 2nd edition, foreword).
Belgium's biggest secret.
"From East Belfast's Kincora Boys' Home, via Leicestershire, Staffordshire and London, to the children's homes of Clwyd, we have witnessed 25 years of cover-up. Cover-up, not to protect the innocent but to protect the regularly named elements of the British establishment who surface whenever widespread evidence of child abuse is exposed. From the public schools right through to the Catholic and Anglican churches, child abuse has been allowed a special place of sanctuary... Social workers, police, security services, local and national political figures remain the common factors in the fall-out from the [child abuse] inquiries... In case after case the cycle is described - a child is 'taken into care', then abused in a home, handed on to an outside pedophile ring and out on to the rent-boy/prostitution circuit beyond, if they live that long... Journalists find themselves battling first with authority, then with the libel laws, to publish the truth about a vast web of abuse."
June 6, 1996, The Guardian, 'True scandal of the child abusers'. These lines were written by the author of the article and are not quotes.
"I look at him [inspector De Baets], and I really want to believe him, but somewhere, I know that I will never make it. The people I have known are too powerful, too influential, too untouchable. I realize that; the investigators not yet."
Victim-witness Regina Louf (X1) from Belgium describes her thoughts when she first began to testify in secret in September 1996 (1998, 'Zwijgen is voor Daders,' p. 203).
Contents
1. Important notes (2010)
2. Foreword
3. Where things began: Dutroux's reign of terror
4. Failure to catch Dutroux
5. Nihoul
6. Victim-witnesses come forward
7. Questioning the alters
8. A sniff of extreme abuse
9. Girls X1 had witnessed being murdered
10. Who backed up the claims of X1
11. Dismantling the investigation
12. Questionable and extremely compromised researchers
13. The accused in finance
14. The accused in (private) intelligence and politics
15. The US connection continued
16. More on Satanism, ritual abuse and Opus Dei involvement
17. Conclusion
18. More extensive articles: Belgium, France, Netherlands
19 Notes
"Imagine, everywhere you hear that story about a blackmail dossier in which organizations of the extreme right are in the possession of pictures and videos on which a number of prominent people in and around Brussels have sex with young girls; minors it is said. The existence of this dossier has always been vehemently denied. Until it was proven that testimonies and videos of this affair indeed were in the possession of the police services. An officer of the judicial police (Marnette, H.G.) denied the existence of these videos, while afterwards this person's superior admitted that they did exist, that they were kept with the judicial police in Brussels, but that they were completely worthless. Strange, because this stuff needs to be deposited with the registrar and not be kept in the possession of some police service. Subsequently, examining magistrate Jean-Marie Schlicker confirms that this dossier does indeed exist, but that he wishes not to give any testimonies about it. The at first non-existing dossier turns out to exist. The videos without substance then turn out to be interesting enough after all to be handed over to the examining magistrate tasked with the investigation into the Gang of Nijvel. But this person subsequently is afraid to testify about that! What do you think that has been going on here?"
~
September 1989, Congressman Hugo Coveliers, secretary of the special investigating committee tasked with evaluating the way gangsterism and terrorism is combated in Belgium (1988-1990), to Humo magazine (1990, Hugo Gijsels, 'De Bende & Co', pp. 133-134). Coveliers became a senator in 1995.
"When I saw in how much trouble he got [sergeant Michel Clippe, who had convinced her to testify] and how my own dossier evolved, I decided to quit. In any case, even back then you could already see how the people surrounding De Baets were collectively being stonewalled. They didn't stand a chance."
~
Victim-witness X2, a police officer. Because of her job she recognized many judges and attorneys among her former abusers. Certain names and details were also given by X1 and other witnesses (1999, 'De X-dossiers', p. 321).
"Only very few reporters are still listening to me, listen to my cry for help. They are not allowed to publish or broadcast. They all tell me that they are stonewalled by their bosses... The aggression of some of the magazines, newspapers and tv programs is frightening. This is not normal anymore, this is a war in which the victims have become disposable waste."
~
Victim-witness Regina Louf (X1) about the media's reaction to the initially open-minded reports about the X1 case by De Morgen and Panorama in January 1998 (1998, 'Zwijgen is voor Daders,' p. 257).
Important notes (2010)
This site continues to be visited by Belgian and Dutch Justice departments, just as many major news outlets. There's never been one complaint about the pictures used.
Some of the earlier used America-based sources to compare the Dutroux Affair with have been deleted. Not reliable. Most other (alternative) writings on this topic tend to be superficial, partly wrong, undocumented, possibly written with damage control in mind, and/or mixed in with typical disinformation.
For all the people who have faith in the alternative media: Alex Jones only published this article (as a news item) on Prison Planet after paying him $500. And only then did several other major "alternative" sites pick it up (Rense; D.I. in the UK; H.M. in Canada). But interestingly, soon thereafter, the amount of money offered didn't seem to matter anymore. After some initial support years back for several superficial articles, they mostly refuse to link to the infinitely more detailed and more documented articles about the Pilgrims, the 1001, Le Cercle or the follow-up articles of Beyond Dutroux.
On the internet you can find several prominent skeptical articles about the only witness who ever went public: X1. It's obvious that these articles still have a huge capacity to seed doubt. Just know that all of the claims they make have been based on manipulations, as this article will show.
Foreword
A number of Dutch and French language books have appeared on the Dutroux affair since 1996, with one standing out above the rest. This is the generally hard-to-get 1999 book 'The X-Dossiers', written by respected investigative journalists Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck. Page after page they explain how the most important aspects of the whole Dutroux investigation, in which Dutroux ultimately became a minor detail, were manipulated and finally discarded. The book presented the most powerful case possible for a massive cover up. However, there was one thing the authors couldn't do and that was to publish the names of those who had been accused by a whole range of witnesses. The reason is obvious: if the authors would have published these names they would have been paying damages for the rest of their lives.
A lot of information in this article can be found in the book 'The X-Dossiers', with the primary difference being that all the names of the alleged abusers have been included. This has become possible because the Dutroux dossier, including the testimonies of the X-witnesses, were leaked to a number of reporters in the late 1990s. Both the final Dutroux dossier, which has largely been sanitized from any important information, and a summary of official reports from August 1996 to May-June 1997 have been used by this author to verify the claims made in a number of books and to find out the identities of the alleged abusers. Seeing the names and reading the biographies can be quite a shock initially, but it will also clarify how a cover up of this magnitude was possible.
The power of the Dutroux affair and its X-Dossiers is that it will enable anyone to see how a state can be controlled and undermined by a cabal that is able to place its "members" in crucial positions in any investigation that might lead to its own exposure. The question of why the majority of the media is so cooperative is the only aspect that cannot be fully explained in this article, although it can be shown that the media is willingly working with official investigators in manipulating and debunking all aspects of an investigation that are not appreciated by this cabal.
Some might find it unethical to publish the names of mere suspects, especially when talking about child abuse. The author fully agrees with this argument, but only under normal circumstances in which an investigation is carried out the way it should be. This has not happened in the Dutroux affair, in which the honest, competent and dedicated researchers, together with the most important witnesses, have unjustly been persecuted, harassed, tarred and feathered by the media and the judiciary, with help from some of the alleged child abusers. That's why the investigation, which has been dead and buried for many years now, should be taken public. And let's not forget that the X-Dossiers involve a whole range of witnesses whose claims overlap and in many cases involve highly specific details that have been verified by detectives. It can also be argued that the mainstream press was anything but discrete in late 1996 when they published the names of the politicians Elio Di Rupo and Jean-Pierre Grafe as alleged child abusers. The evidence these claims were based on was meager to say the least and many times less powerful than the combined testimonies of the X-witnesses. But, of course, the purpose of this event was not to inform the public; it was an effort to discredit the rumors about high level involvement in child abuse networks. It was known that sooner or later the X-witnesses would reach the news and this was one of the "pre-emptive strikes" against these witnesses.
Several appendixes have been attached to this article. Most of these appendixes, which include long lists of accused, victims, investigators and apparently assassinated, were more or less finished before a beginning was made with writing this article. It has actually taken about 1,5 years to fill in all the biographies and translate the necessary passages of all the Dutch and French sources used, but this was definitely worth the effort as it gave tremendous insight in what has been going on in Belgium since the late 1970s, and provided some perspective to reports that have come from the United States and elsewhere. It might be the last thing you'd expect from a country with only ten million inhabitants, but Belgium's history of internal subversion takes quite a while to get through.
Where things began: Dutroux's reign of terror
In the afternoon of August 13, 1996, progress was finally made: a number of individuals were arrested on strong suspicions that they had been responsible for a wave of kidnappings of young girls. Within days these suspicions were backed up with solid evidence, but the arrest of Dutroux and some of his associates turned out to be only the beginning of the biggest scandal in Belgian history.
The media attention had begun in June 1995 with the disappearance of two 8 year old girls, Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo. Almost exactly two months later, the 17 year old An Marchal and the 19 year old Eefje Lambrecks went missing. Additional media attention was drawn to the latter case as the last thing these girls did was visit the show of Rasti Rostelli, a prominent magician, in which they had been hypnotized. Needless to say, the affair ended the career of the magician, even though he had almost immediately been cleared as a suspect. In late 1995, the BOB (Belgian FBI and branch of the gendarmerie) largely ceased to investigate the case. However, the disappearance of An and Eefje remained prominent, because a foundation named Marc & Corinne, set up several years earlier and named after two teenagers who had been brutally murdered, used its limited funds to spread posters of the girls' faces all over Belgium and the Netherlands. In the end this made no difference; the girls weren't found, nor those responsible, and in May 1996 history repeated itself. This time the 12 year old Sabine Dardenne disappeared, and again the BOB was unable to find the kidnappers or the girl. People became more worried for their children with every kidnapping. Confidence in the police and judiciary, traditionally already quite low, began sinking to new depths.
Things changed later that year. On Friday, August 9, 1996 the 14 year old Laetitia Delhez disappeared in Bertrix, a town located in the district of Neufchateau, near the border of France and Luxemburg. Michel Bourlet, prosecutor of the king in Neufchateau, was tasked with the case and appointed examining magistrate Jacques Langlois to coordinate the investigation. When Langlois left for vacation the following Monday, Bourlet replaced him with his close colleague Jean-Marc Connerotte. The latter duo had already become well known in 1994 for not being allowed to solve the murder on Andre Cools, a socialist politician.
The same Monday that Connerotte took over from Langlois, BOB adjutant Jean-Pierre Peters reported a breakthrough in the investigation. Of the several dozen tips, two turned out to be very useful. Two witnesses had seen an old white van driving around Bertrix the day Laetitia disappeared. In one of these two cases a student was afraid the driver of the van was planning to steal his bike. As luck would have it, the 22-year-old had a passion for cars and reported to the police the exact type of van and a good chunk of its license plate, as the first three letters reminded him of the name of his sister. In no time Dutroux's name, a known pedophile, came out of the computer. A crisis meeting was held in Bertrix that evening and the following day Dutroux, his wife Michele Martin, and his sidekick Michel Lelievre were arrested. In the following days their testimonies led to the retrieval of two girls, Sabine and Laetitia, in Dutroux's basements. Belgium's case of the century was about to begin.
Failure to catch Dutroux
In the following months and years details came out about the failure of the police and BOB to catch Dutroux in an earlier stage. Although usually not presented in such a way, most of these rather odd failures can be ascribed to BOB officer Rene Michaux.
As head of Operation Othello, a surveillance operation against Dutroux from August 10, 1995 to January 1996, he practically knew everything there was to know about this already convicted, violent pedophile. From all sides evidence was presented to him that Dutroux not only had kidnapped Julie and Melissa, but also An and Eefje. However, Michaux ignored evidence presented by such informants as Claude Thirault, to whom Dutroux had mentioned how to kidnap young girls and how much you could get for them; Dutroux's mother, who had gathered evidence from her son's neighbors that he was likely involved in the kidnappings; and police officer Christian Dubois, who early on was on the trail of the gang of Nihoul, which would immediately have led to Dutroux.
In between all these reports, the video cameras aimed at Dutroux's Marcinelle home as part of Operation Othello failed to register Dutroux bringing in An and Eefje on August 22, nor would Michaux's team notice Eefje's failed escape attempt on August 25, in which she briefly climbed out the bathroom window to shout for help. An and Eefje were taken out of the house in September and murdered.
When finally forced to search Dutroux's Marcinelle home for reasons not related to the kidnappings, Michaux decided to ignore the voices of two young girls, seemingly not even trying to get a response from them. He also didn't think that Dutroux's odd L-shaped basement, with one wall much newer than all the others, was reason enough to tear it down, nor did he recognize the significance of such items as vaginal cream, a speculum, chains, and a videotape with the name of a program on it dealing with missing children. Two other videos which would have shown Dutroux working on his basement and him raping a 14 year old girl were returned to Dutroux's wife, apparently without having been reviewed by his team. This failure of properly searching Dutroux's home apparently led to the death of Julie and Melissa, who are believed to have died from starvation in Dutroux's basement. It also led to the kidnapping of Sabine and Laetitia after Dutroux got out of jail in March 1996.
Michaux
Rene Michaux, one of the world's most incompetent police officers.
In August 1996, after Dutroux had been arrested on suspicions that he had kidnapped Laetitia, Michaux led another three hour search in Dutroux's Marcinelle home where at that moment Sabine and Laetitia were located. Needless to say, Michaux not only failed to find the girls, which could possibly have led to the release of Dutroux, he also hadn't noticed the letters Sabine had hidden under Dutroux's carpet. Luckily, the location of the girls would be pointed out by Dutroux 48 hours later, after it had become clear to him there was no way out this time, especially not with his lackey Michel Lelievre spilling the beans.
These failures of Michaux led to strong criticism from the parents of An Marchal, who went to inspect Dutroux's basement themselves. The parents of Melissa Russo filed an official complaint against him. When Bourlet criticized Michaux in 2004 over his failure to even find Sabine's letters, and seemingly implied this might not have been unintentional, Michaux could only react by calling Bourlet a "liar" and stating that "he sure wouldn't have found Laetitia under the carpet." These intellectual replies were soon followed by threats to sue for libel. Michaux's extreme incompetence was rewarded with a new position as a local police commissioner.
Following is a brief recap of Dutroux's life and how extraordinarily incompetent the judiciary had to be to allow him to go on kidnapping girls.
Dutroux's had a long history of physically abusing women.
Convicted in November 1988 for kidnapping, photographing, torturing and raping five girls between the age of 11 and 19. Also convicted for torturing an older woman by putting a razor in her vagina. He tried to force her into giving him money.
In April 1992, PSC Minister of Justice Melchior Wathelet approved Dutroux's release from prison. Although it is normal in Belgium to be released after a third of the sentence has been served out, many in the system who worked with Dutroux did not agree with this decision. Dutroux was known to them as a manipulative psychopath without any regrets for his crimes. In fact, he never even admitted to them. Interestingly, Wathelet would be accused in the X-Dossiers of being a violent child abuser himself, together with some of his known proteges and associates. [1]
After his release, Dutroux received an unusually large amount of sleeping pills and sedatives from his doctor, which he would later use to quiet the girls he abducted. [2]
In his house in Marcinelle, near Charleroi, where he lived most of the time, Dutroux began constructing a concealed dungeon in the basement. In early 1993, the unemployed, small-time criminal Claude Thirault, who rented one of Dutroux's homes, was hired by Dutroux as a handyman to install water drains beneath one of his newly-bought houses. Although Thirault thought this was a bit unusual, he didn't mind doing it. But a few days into the job two girls walked past the house they were working on, prompting Dutroux to remark to Thirault: "If you want to kidnap them, you'll make 150,000 franks [about 4000 euro]... Grab them from behind, put a sedative drug under their nose, pull them into the car, and lock the doors." [3] Dutroux went on to explain how he had plans to abduct girls, lock them up in his basement and transport them abroad. [4] Thirault, an occasional police informant, went to the police, and as a result Dutroux's houses were searched some months later, in December, the official reason being that he was suspected of a car theft. The police officers noticed Dutroux's modified basement, but did not find any girls. His house was searched again in June 1994 and it appeared to the officers that he had stopped working on the basement.
In June 1995, Dutroux was sued for having illegally widened an opening to his basement in an effort to put in a venting tube. [5]
Thirault went back to the police after Julie and Melissa had disappeared to remind them of Dutroux's ideas about kidnapping girls and the modifications to his basement. The police got back to Thirault a few days later and asked him if he had some more solid evidence, apparently needed if the house of this known pedophile was to be searched. [6]
On June 24, 1995, examining magistrate Martine Doutrewe became head of the 'Julie and Melissa cell', tasked with finding the missing girls. Unfortunately for the girls, Doutrewe left for vacation in Italy within days of being assigned to this post and would not return until early August 9 (38 years old at the time; suffered from cancer and had already planned to recover from an operation; died in 1999; in 1995, her husband was under investigating for having embezzled millions of euros). No other permanent investigating judge was appointed in her place which significantly impacted the efficiency of the entire investigation. [7] Doutrewe would never seriously get involved with the BOB operation that was to monitor Dutroux's daily activities. The magistrate also never tried to arrange a phone tap, a search warrant or approval for a financial investigation. [8]
On August 10, 1995, a group of BOB officers began monitoring Dutroux's movements under the code name Operation Othello. A time lapse video camera was used less than 2% of the total observation period [9] and operations were suspended at 10 o'clock each evening. [10] The operation was so ineffective that on August 22, Dutroux was able to kidnap An and Eefje and lock them up in his house -completely unnoticed. On August 25, Eefje managed to grab her clothes, crawl out of the bathroom window and shout for help. Although she was pulled back in by Dutroux within seconds, the observers never noticed anything. A few weeks later the girls were taken out of the house -again unnoticed- and murdered. Dutroux was also able to kidnap three teenagers he suspected of having double-crossed him and lock them up in his house without any cameras or observers noticing anything. In addition, Dutroux had murdered Bernhard Weinstein during the period that he was under observation.
On September 4, 1995, Dutroux's mother, who advised against the 1992 release of her son, anonymously informed Rene Michaux, investigative head of Operation Othello, that the neighbors of Dutroux were very suspicious about his activities. Windows were blackened out, Dutroux was always making noise in the basement, the garden was filled with used car tires, and two girls "of 16 or 18 years old" had recently been seen in his garden. These girls had never been observed during daylight. This information somehow didn't make it to the investigating team that was working on the case of An and Eefje, who were 17 and 19 years old. [11]
On December 6, 1995, Dutroux was arrested for having been involved in stealing a truck and kidnapping and torturing three teenagers he suspected of having restolen the vehicle (one of the teenagers had escaped and informed the police). Under the leadership of gendarme officer Rene Michaux, Dutroux's homes were searched on December 13 and again on December 19. One or more children were heard crying by Michaux and the locksmith (this person did not know anything about Dutroux being a suspect in the kidnapping of girls) accompanying him. They went to look in the basement, which clearly had a whole section which had recently been modified [12], but couldn't find anything, leading Michaux to conclude that the voices must have come from outside. [13] The parents of Julie Lejeune, one of the children that was locked up there at the time, would later prove that normal communication was possible with someone locked up in one of the cells. [14] Additionally, during the December 13 search of Dutroux's basement, Michaux found vaginal cream, chloroform, a speculum (medical instrument used to dilate bodily orifices) and chains, which to him were no cause for alarm. Videos were confiscated, which showed Dutroux working on his basement and raping a number of (unknown) girls. On one of the tapes the text "Perdu de Vue, Marc" was written, a reference to the tv program 'Lost From Sight' which dealt with missing children, and on which Julie and Melissa had also featured. Michaux and team never watched the tapes and gave them back to Dutroux's wife, Michele Martin. [15]
In the afternoon of December 13, after the disastrous search in Dutroux's Marcinelle home, Michaux met with police officer Christian Dubois. Both had been working on a recent phenomenon involving occupants of white Mercedesses following and photographing schoolgirls. On this occasion, Dubois informed Michaux that he had an informant who had stated that the white Mercedesses belonged to a pedophile network centered around a company called Achats Services Commerces (ASCO; not to be confused with X1's abuse and snuff factory) located in the Brussels' suburbs. According to the informant, the occupants of the white Mercedesses were putting together catalogs of pictures of children. Their clients could pick one of these kids, which would then be kidnapped, locked up in Belgium for a while, and then exported to eastern Europe or Thailand. The price for each child would be about 7500 euros. During their conversation Michaux told Dubois about Dutroux. Dubois recalled: "I remember that Michaux told me that Dutroux went to countries in eastern Europe... The sums he mentioned for the kidnappings were similar to those given to me by my informant... Even today this still keeps me awake at night. I feel responsible. Afterwards, in 1996, I looked into Dutroux... You just felt it. This was the man we were looking for!" Michaux undertook no action and the Verwilghen Commission would later scratch its head why. ASCO turned out to be a highly interesting company. It was incorporated on July 2, 1991, primarily by Jean-Louis Delamotte, a friend and regular business partner of Michel Nihoul. Nihoul, Bernard Weinstein, Michel Lelievre and Michele Martin (not Dutroux) had all been spotted on a regular basis in the immediate surroundings of the company. People in the neighborhood had also noted that Nihoul was often surrounded by young negro girls and had the impression that these girls were on transit. Five mattresses and some baby milk were found inside the company's headquarters after it had gone bankrupt in 1994. Delamotte's company Soparauto, registered at the same address, owned 5 white Mercedesses, all with French license plates, as had been reported. [16] Delamotte would later also be pointed out as the thug who intimidated one of the X-witnesses [17], including the person who had initially looked after this witness.
On March 20, 1996, Dutroux was released unusually early on "humanitarian reasons"; his wife was about to have a baby. Operation Othello, the program that was monitoring Dutroux's movements, had been shut down in January, because Dutroux was in jail. The operation was not revived after his release.
In August 1996, Dutroux was finally caught by Michel Bourlet and Jean-Marc Connerotte. Sabine, one of two girls locked in the basement, had hidden letters under Dutroux's carpet. Michaux failed to find them, for which he would be criticized by Michel Bourlet in 2004. [18]
Even though more than 10 years have passed since Dutroux was arrested on suspicions of having kidnapped Laetitia, largely because of Michaux it is still somewhat of a mystery how many videos were confiscated in late 1995 and in August 1996. [19] Initial reports after Dutroux's arrest stated that the justice department was in the possession of more than 300 videos [20]; within several weeks this number was upped to 5,000 videos. Reports that Dutroux's accomplices, including a number of high level officials, could be seen on these tapes also began to appear. [21] In the end, this seems to have been a huge exaggeration [22], even though the exact amount of videos remains a bit of a mystery. [23] Most estimates today are below 100, and only a portion of these videos appear to have shown Dutroux abusing young girls.
Mich
Michel Nihoul, Dutroux's apparent link to the upper echelons of the network. Found guilty by the jury, before it was overruled by the presiding judges. [31] Nihoul is the ultimate example of an unscrupulous villain, but for some reason he has enjoyed the protection of many magistrates and media outlets.
Nihoul
One of the most important reasons for speculation about a network has been Michel Nihoul. This person had been arrested on August 16 after the investigators of Bourlet and Connerotte found out that on August 10, one day after Lelievre and Dutroux had kidnapped Laetitia, Nihoul had supplied Lelievre, free of charge, with 1,000 XTC pills. The original investigators immediately suspected that these pills served as a payment for the kidnapping of Laetitia, suspicions which were only fueled when Nihoul was unable to provide an alibi for August 8 [24], the day when at least 8 witnesses claim to have seen Nihoul in Bertrix at and around the location where Laetitia would be kidnapped the next day. Additionally, some of these witnesses claimed to have seen Nihoul in the presence of Dutroux (or his van), who was carrying out an initial surveillance that day. [25] Both Dutroux's wife Michele Martin and Michel Lelievre specified that Dutroux, at least in some cases, kidnapped girls according to specific wishes of clients. Martin stated that one of these clients was Michel Nihoul.
Michele Martin, Dutroux's wife:
"I have heard Marc personally telling Lelievre that he should bring a girl for Michel Nihoul. If I haven't mentioned that before, that is because I'm afraid of that gang, I mean Nihoul, Marc Dutroux and others in Brussels. I mean well-placed individuals who Nihoul knew. The connections of Nihoul made me fear for my children and myself... I was afraid, because Jean-Michel Nihoul, Marc Dutroux and Michel Lelievre were part of a gang that was involved in all kinds of business, like drugs, pills, girls and forged papers [ISGP note: for which Nihoul would later indeed be convicted, just as human trafficking]. I have to say that at the time of the kidnapping of Sabine and Laetitia, Michel Nihoul, as I already stated, often called to Sars, to my home. He was looking for Marc Dutroux. He didn't call for me. When Nihoul tried to reach Marc he always remained vague. I never knew why he called so often to Marc Dutroux. Over time I became more and more convinced that Marc Dutroux and Jean-Michel Nihoul did things that couldn't stand the light of day and which I was not supposed to know about." [26]
quot;By the way, Marc told me that he went more and more to Brussels and met an increasing number of people in light of his activities with Michel Nihoul... Nihoul always gave me the impression that he had many connections that he could count on. Marc Dutroux told me that Nihoul had taken care of many of Lelievre's problems: he had prevented that he was arrested, he had worked out his fines and solved his money problems. Marc had accurately sensed that he would benefit from continuing to see Nihoul, because of his connections and those of his wife, the lawyer. The more they saw each other, the more they opened up of course. I think that at a certain moment a mutual trust was built. I see evidence of that in a conversation between Lelievre and Marc that I coincidentally heard and in which Dutroux said that they had to bring back a girl for Nihoul. I think that Jean-Michel had influence on Marc Dutroux. Marc often told me that he was impressed by the connections Nihoul had." [27]
Michel Lelievre:
"Marc always told me that he kidnapped girls for people who had placed an order with him. When he came out of prison in March 1996, I asked him who did the orders when he was in jail. He answered me that somebody else did that and that he certainly wasn't the only one. When we went to pick up a girl, Marc wanted that she corresponded with the order, small hips. He gave me a description of the girl that we were looking for. [One day] I asked him why they [An and Eefje] were still with him even though he claimed he had an order. He told me that the people who had placed the order had come, but that they weren't interested in them... Dutroux explained me that he conditioned the girls to be obedient and submissive when they arrived at customers..." [28]
"I would like to reveal other things about Jean-Michel Nihoul, but I don't want that these testimonies are taken up in the dossier. As I said, I fear for my life and those around me. I remind you that Nihoul told me the following: 'if you cross me, I will destroy you'. With those words he made it known to me that he would kill me or have me killed." [29]
Dutroux_Nihoul
Dutroux and Nihoul.
Although convicted for financial fraud, drug- and human trafficking due to an overwhelming amount of evidence [30], Nihoul was ultimately acquitted from charges that he was involved in the kidnapping and murder of any of Dutroux's girls. However, to anyone who has taken an in depth look into the case, it's clear that a whole lot of leads had to be ignored and discarded before this conclusion could be reached [32], raising two important questions: How, and why?
Victim-witnesses come forward
Probably the most important (and underreported) thing that happened in the aftermath of the Dutroux affair was that a number of victims from pedophile networks felt that this was their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to testify about what they had experienced. Until Connerotte and Bourlet were able to arrest Dutroux and Nihoul, and retrieve two missing girls, these victim-witnesses did not know who in the Justice Department they could trust. Many of these victims already had tried to speak to the authorities, but investigations never got off the ground. The victims knew the reason: among their abusers were the most powerful men in Belgium: police commissioners, gendarme officers, judges, bankers, businessmen, politicians and high nobility figures.
Not all, but most of these victims who came to Neufchateau to testify about "the network" were designated with an X, followed by a number. Although some of these women later on turned out to have known each other from the network, at the time they decided to testify to Neufchateau none of them had been in contact with each other for many years. Their interviews were conducted separately and they did not have access to each other's testimonies. A short introduction to each victim follows. [33]
X1
Born in 1969. Abused and neglected by her parents. When 2 years old, sent to her grandmother in Knokke, who owned a hotel-villa that was used as a brothel for high-level pedophiles and sadists. Pedophile videos were also shot here. Introduced to her pimp, Tony Vandenbogaert, at age 4 who began to take her to other locations for sexual abuse and torture. Sent back to her parents in Gent in June 1979 for a variety of reasons. Extremely neglected by her parents for several months until her old pimp showed up again. For years she was taken to abuse- and torture parties. Managed to hook up with a boy she fell in love with, married, and immediately moved out in 1988, which appears to have saved her from ending up in a snuff movie. Never managed to break away completely from the network. Sometimes when her husband left the house for a few days to work as a truck driver, her pimp and some of his associates would show up and take her with them to locations where children were abused. On these occasions she was raped herself or had to participate in abuse against others. X1 was diagnosed with MPD/DID.
Nathalie C. (X7)
Born in 1969. Contacted by the BOB after testimonies from X1. First denied knowing anything about X1. It soon turned out that she was heavily traumatized and probably had MPD/DID. After having been brought in for an interview she began to speak about her father, how he sexually abused her, and how he liked to mutilate her sister with cigarettes. She then confirmed that she had been X1's best friend, that she knew about the sexual relationship with Tony and that she had been forbidden to go to the first floor of the hotel-villa of X1's grandmother. The interviews were cancelled by later investigators. X4 identified X7 as a girl who was forced to play in pedophile movies.
Chantal S.
Born in 1968. Another woman contacted by the BOB after testimonies from X1. Immediately knew what it was about. Sexually abused by her parents. Her grandmother was into Satanism. Moved with her parents to Knokke at age 6 and was sometimes brought to the hotel-villa of X1's grandmother. Here she also was sexually abused, although she didn't have to endure the extreme torture sessions that X1 regularly underwent. Confirmed that one of the abusers indeed was nicknamed "Monsieur". Had seen X1 being threatened with a revolver by her grandmother. Like X7, she was forbidden to go to the first floor. Chantal's testimonies resulted in a verbal fight between her husband and parents, in which her father admitted to have brought her to X1's grandmother. Tried to commit suicide and was taken up again in a mental institution. X4 identified Chantal also as a girl who was forced to play in pedophile movies.
X2
Police officer who worked on an aspect of the Dutroux investigation. When the X1 case was discussed during a meeting, participants noticed that she seemed very upset. After discussing her history of child abuse with one of her superior officers she decided to become a witness. X2 had ended up as a mistress to a magistrate in Brussels and later to a higher level officer and spokesperson of the Justice Department who was a member of the Rotary. These two men were part of a network in which she was abused from the mid- to late 1980s. X2 was spared from the extreme torture sessions, but heard other girls speak about child murders and was present at a hunting party on children, which is something other Xs have also spoken about. Some of the abusers and locations where this abuse was going on turned out to be the same as mentioned by X1 and other Xs. Withdrew as a witness when she saw that the investigation was being sabotaged, something which didn't surprise her.
X3
X3 had been in the network a long time ago, from 1950 to 1962. From age 3 to 12, she had been severely abused and tortured at home, together with her sister. After that age, her father and his influential group of friends brought her into the network. She described the same elements as other X-witnesses, although the scale of one of the meetings she described is hard to accept without any of the other witnesses backing up the practices at this specific location (some of those involved were in fact mentioned by others). Before contacting Neufchateau, X3 had already written anonymously about her experiences with child abuse and she was well respected for her work with other child abuse victims. It took five interviews before investigators wrote anything down, and even after writing summaries of her testimony it was attempted to leave out the royal family as much as possible - an unwritten rule in Belgium, because the king, in theory, can't be prosecuted.
X4
Born in 1965. Like X1, X4 had been persuaded by a friend to testify. As a young child she was loaned out by her mother to a pimp named Jacques V., who produced SM movies with children. Her story largely paralleled that of X1, although X4 experienced everything from within different sects. She recognized two childhood friends of X1 who had been abused, and named some of the same perpetrators as the other witnesses. X4's parents turned out to live next to a villa where X1 claimed a friend had been abused to such an extent that she died.
Nathalie W.
Born in 1965. With support from her therapist she gave her first testimony to the gendarmerie in February 1996, six months before the Dutroux affair. The officer who interviewed her refused to write down an official report. In July 1996, she found two other gendarme officers who were willing to work with her. Nathalie told how she had been raped by her father, a member of the Rotary, since the age of six. Soon thereafter brought into the network and was abused by her father's friends at parties in different villas in the region of Waterloo. When 10 years old, handed by her father to a prince and his main aide, who continued to take her to different abuse parties in Belgium. Confirmed X1's story about the Les Atrebates club, Nihoul and Tony. In turn, X1 recognized Nathalie as a girl from the network and accurately placed her at Les Atrebates. Even though Nathalie confirmed aspects of X1's story, she was easily discredited by her new interrogators, as she not only suffered from extreme psychological trauma (MPD/DID), but also from pathomimie, which is a tendency to inflict physical harm to one's own body in order to play the victim. This last psychological quirk seemed to have surfaced mainly after her original interviewers were replaced by two extremely abusive ones (like would happen with X1). She couldn't handle this pressure and quit testifying in March 1997. Nathalie was severely persecuted for having dared to step forward with her story, maybe even more than X1.
VM1
A gangster who came to Neufchateau in February 1997. Told how he had been brought up in a children's home in Mont-Saint-Guibert. From age 9 to 13, he was regularly picked up from this home by a local juvenile judge who brought him to abuse parties in villas around Brussels. Said that he later worked as a child prostitute in Le Mirano, an elitist club visited by some of the same men that featured in the testimonies of other victim-witnesses above, including Nihoul. Within two days of his supposedly secret testimony, VM1 was stopped on the streets and threatened with death.
Notice how these victims ended up in the network: instead of having been grabbed from the streets, they were brought in by their own families, or, in one case, taken from a children's home.
At least in western Europe, the idea of a lonely pedophile grabbing children from the street only seems applicable in a relatively small amount of cases (especially permanent abductions). There's a significant amount of evidence that a lot of child abuse happens within networks consisting of degenerate families and their acquaintances [34], which are exploited and protected (really for reasons not fully understood) by people higher up in the food chain. [35] Children in the network often are forced to bring in other children. [36] The new ones are then controlled through certain psychological routines involving threats, shame and guilt. [37]
Although victim-witnesses often report having witnessed many murders in these networks, including children from western Europe, data about child disappearances and deaths is very uncategorized and therefore very inconsistent. [38] As for the whole of Belgium, estimates range from "at least" 43 disappearances between 1973 and 1996 [39] to as many as 1,022 in one year, with the D.A.'s office in Brussels claiming that approximately 280 children a year go missing in just Brussels alone. [40] Also, if victims from these networks or some of the above numbers are correct, the obvious conclusion is that the media is not paying attention to many, if not the majority of child disappearances and deaths, which, in case of the British media, seems to be the true. [41]
One interesting aspect many victim-witnesses from different countries have testified about is a very similar psychological approach used to allow the victims of even the most sadistic abuse to function (somewhat) in society, therefore not raising any really alarming questions in the immediate surroundings of the child. We are referring here to the encouraging and maintaining of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) in the victims. [42] MPD has these days been renamed to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). It basically is a psychological disorder in which the mind and the memory of the victim is shattered in ten, hundred, or possibly even a thousand different sub-personalities, making testifying extremely difficult and a very long term process. Several X-Dossier witnesses still heavily suffered from this disorder at the time they began to testify.
Questioning the alters
Although a one hundred percent confirmed psychological disorder, MPD/DID remains quite controversial in the public's eye (for those who even heard about it). It's true that DID is a complex disorder and sometimes hard to wrap the mind around (pardon the unintentional pun). But this is largely the result of a lack of information, and if any of the politically correct arguments are stripped away, the real underlying reasons for the controversy become quite simple.
First of all, DID is intrinsically linked to the most extreme sexual and psychological abuse against children. In 97 to 98 percent of the DID cases, victims talk about having been sexually abused since a young age. [43] It's not uncommon for DID patients to give details about abuse that sound so bizarre, horrifying and huge that, no matter what the evidence, will take some time and repeating for the average person to accept as even a possibility. Protected child abuse and -torture networks involving well known individuals would be a primary example of that.
The second reason is that these networks are protected by those involved, who apparently have the power to make sure that very little information on these networks appears in the public domain. Additionally, a rather small, but very influential group of "skeptics", organized around the US-based False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), have been doing a counter-attack since the early 1990s when reports of ritual abuse became a little bit too widespread. [44] This group has done everything in its power to convince the public and the psychology community that all DID is created by incompetent psychologists. Because of an incorrect way of asking questions, these psychologists would have inserted certain "false memories" in their patient's minds. Even though more than a dozen board members of the FMSF have been accused of child abuse themselves, have come out in favor of pedophilia, or have a past in mind control research for a whole range of intelligence agencies [45], virtually no mainstream media ever felt the need to consistently point that out. As might be expected, Dutch and Belgian supporters of this FMS Foundation couldn't resist an attempt to discredit X1 with textbook disinformation tactics. [46]
But even though FMS Foundation supporters have tried to muddy the waters somewhat, every textbook psychology book makes a clear distinction between DID and schizophrenia. The latter is characterized by delusions, hallucinations and a lack of sense of identity. The different alters of a person suffering from DID, however, all have an identity of their own, and although memory is never 100 percent accurate and there remains the possibility of manipulation, these alters have experienced something traumatic that actually did happen to this person. A brief article on the website of Merck, a large pharmaceutical company, gives one of the best summaries of what Dissociative Identity Disorder actually is:
"Dissociative identity disorder appears to be a rather common mental disorder [other sources say that DID is quite rare]. It can be found in 3 to 4% of people hospitalized for other mental health disorders and in a sizable minority of people in drug abuse treatment facilities. However, some authorities [the FMSF] believe that many cases of this disorder reflect the influence of therapists on suggestible people...
"Dissociative identity disorder appears to be caused by the interaction of several factors. These include overwhelming stress; an ability to separate one's memories, perceptions, or identity from conscious awareness; abnormal psychological development, and insufficient protection and nurture during childhood... About 97 to 98% of adults with dissociative identity disorder report having been abused during childhood...
"... some symptoms may reflect the intrusions of past experiences into the present. For example, sadness may indicate coexisting depression, or it may be that one of the personalities is reliving emotions associated with past misfortunes... People with this disorder are prone to injuring themselves. They may engage in self-mutilation. Many attempt suicide.
"In dissociative identity disorder, some of a person's personalities are aware of important personal information, whereas other personalities are unaware. Some personalities appear to know and interact with one another in an elaborate inner world. For example, personality A may be aware of personality B and know what B does, as if observing B's behavior; personality B may or may not be aware of personality A...
"Because the personalities often interact with each other, people with dissociative personality disorder report hearing inner conversations and the voices of other personalities commenting on their behavior or addressing them [not to be confused with hallucinations]. They experience distortion of time, with time lapses and amnesia...
"People with dissociative identity disorder may not be able to recall things they have done or account for changes in their behavior. Often they refer to themselves as "we," "he," or "she." While most people cannot recall much about the first 3 to 5 years of life, people with dissociative identity disorder may have considerable amnesia for the period between the ages of 6 and 11 as well." [47]
X1 suffered from all the symptoms described above, and more. She told how many of her alters still had the same age as when they were created, or how her handwriting differed depending on which alter was active. [48] As is obvious from her background of extreme abuse, these symptoms started at an early age. And interestingly, her pimp not only wasn't surprised when he first encountered X1's alters, he actually cultivated them.
"More than ever I discovered that I was missing time. I turned out to have gone to school, get good grades, I even turned out to know several classmates who spoke to me, but somehow this all had gone past me. It seemed as if someone else took over from me as soon as the door of my house closed behind me. It seemed as if the abused Ginie was put away until Tony again stood at my bed or at the school gate. The abused Ginie hardly was aware of school and family life, the other Ginie seemed not present during the abuse, and so lived 'normal'.
"It had always been this way. In Knokke, at grandmother's, the adults had noticed that I talked to the voices in my head, that I often rapidly changed moods, or even began to speak with another voice or accent. Even though I was only 5 or 6, I understood that something like this was weird and that it was not allowed. I learned to hide my voices, my other 'selves'. After what had happened to Clo, the voices, and the bizarre feeling that I at times was led by the inner voices (persons? -sic) got stronger. After the initiation I no longer resisted against the voices. It was blissful to disappear into nothingness, and only to become conscious again if Tony was there. The pain seemed more bearable.
"Tony was the only adult who understood that something was 'wrong' in my head. He didn't get mad about it, but cultivated it. He gave me different names: Pietemuis, Meisje, Hoer, Bo. The names slowly started to become part of me. The strange thing was that if he mentioned a name, the mood that fit that name was immediately called up. Pietemuis [Small Mouse] became the name of the little girl that he brought home after the abuse - a scared and nervous girl that he could comfort by talking to her in a caring and fatherly kind of way. Meisje [Girl] was the name of that part of me that only belonged to him. If he abused me in my bed in the early morning, for example, or if there was no one around us. Hoer [Whore], the name of that part of me that worked for him. Bo, the young woman who cared for him if he was drunk and needed to be looked after.
"'Now you just leave that to me,' he said when I asked him curiously why he gave me so many names, 'daddy Tony knows you better than you know yourself.' That was also true." [49]
Some of X1's other 100+ alters were Kenny, a young alter who had dealt with some of the worst torture; Stone, one of the toughest who answered to Tony and could control her fears; and Moon, born to deal with extreme cold. [50]
Even after years of seeing a psychiatrist, X1 still suffered heavily from MPD/DID when she first contacted the Neufchateau investigating cell in September 1996. It took some time before her interviewers, Patriek De Baets and Philippe Hupez, began to understand how to work with her, but in the end, testifying turned out to be the most effective way to reintegrate X1's mind. [51] This was a long and extremely challenging process though, and not only for X1. At times the long silences and panic attacks almost drove the interviewers crazy. An example of one of the interview sessions:
"... Meisje [Girl] sits on the window sill, saturated with pain and sadness. She feels the presence of the other victims so well that she can almost touch them with her thoughts. Shivering she crawls against the woodwork of the window and presses herself against it as if she wants to disappear in it... Patriek [De Baets] comes standing next to her, leaning against the window sill.
'Who are the girls you still remember, girl?' he asks, coincidentally pronouncing her name [of the active alter, "Girl"].
'Vero, Mieke, Clo, Noelle, Chrissie...' she says fluently, because she remembered every face, every child.
Patriek was perplexed. After such a difficult hearing, all of a sudden he heard his witness, in a young girl's voice, give a series of names that made him silent.
'Are they still alive?'
Meisje [Girl] lifted her shoulders.
'Some are, I think. Others are not.'...
'Who died?' he asked calmly.
'Chrissie,' I whispered.
Patriek asked how.
'They burned her.'
'Where?'
'In a basement,' she whispered even more quiet. And she withdrew deep within herself, fighting against the odor of the liquid that they had poured over her.
And then when he wanted to ask more, she shook her head.
'I want to go home,' she begged. Away from those horrible memories.
But Chrissie didn't leave her head anymore.
Her screams, her begs for help... Tiu [Regina's murdered child]. Everything came together that week, as if time was something malleable, and became alive again as soon as the images were recalled.
My son, whom I had cherished; Chrissie who soon thereafter was gruesomely punished; the screaming in my head. The madness I had felt in the days after. The madness that had started when they... but I refused to let the images come through...
"Pain? Indeed. It hurt so much that I could only tell via a detour who that day were with Chrissie. It almost drove Patriek and Philippe up the wall. Before them they saw a grown, frightened woman, while they had to communicate with Kenny, the heavily traumatized alter, who had become almost autistic after the death of Tiu and Chrissie. Kenny carried that information with him, but could not speak... stubborn, frightened, evasive, he pushed the questions of the BOB officers away. Only through the support of other alters, who listened along and were located close to him, it was possible for Kenny, stammering and rambling, to tell his story." [52]
A sniff of extreme abuse
DID was created in X1 because of her background of extreme abuse. But what did this abuse actually involve?
First there was the psychological aspect. X1 never received any support or love from her parents, her grandmother, Tony or any of her abusers. Especially Tony and the grandmother, who acted as her pimps, indoctrinated X1 with the belief that she was a nobody, that besides Tony nobody cared about a "little whore" like her, that she was too stupid to become anything else than a prostitute, and that "love" is something you never get for free.
animals
Regina Louf (X1) described how she and others were sometimes raped by German shepherds or even how snakes were inserted into the vaginas of the girls. It sounds bizarre, but take a look at the pictures above. These have been confiscated from a child abuse network and appeared in the Dutroux dossier, DVD 3, 47073774-1 to 4.pdf. There are hundreds of children on these (low quality) pictures, making you wonder where all of them are today and how they are doing (or if they're alive in the first place). Judging from these pictures (and there are many more), sex with dogs and other animals is very common in child abuse networks.
Furthermore, X1 was blamed for just about anything that happened to her, to other children in the network, to her pets, or even to those who abused her. For example, if X1 had given fellatio to her pimp which wasn't satisfying enough, he would beat her up, yelling at her that she was worthless and that it was her fault he was so upset. If X1's abusers found out that she had given out signals of her abuse to the outside world, another girl would be tortured in front of her eyes. During the torture the perpetrators would scream at her that this was all her fault, and would put her face in the other girl's blood. X1 then had to ask forgiveness to the other girl. Even when X1's best friend was raped and murdered in front of her eyes -probably because this girl became too old- she was the one to blame. In most cases X1 was blamed for things she had absolutely no control over. The same thing happened to many other girls in the network. For the abusers it was a way to destroy the victim's self-esteem and confidence, making them perfect sex slaves and objects for sadistic torture. [53]
Besides the psychological indoctrination, X1 and the other victims reported to have undergone a whole range of other traumatic experiences. A session of violent anal sex at age 3 certainly would fit in that category, as would being raped by a dog at age 4. But there also were the ice cold showers, the long and painful tie-downs, the many beatings, the rapes with knives and scissors and the torture with razor blades. [54] One of X1's many experiences:
"Père forced me back on my knees, pushed me with my face on the cool table surface, and the other tied my left- and right wrist to the bed... I was unable to move in any direction and was forced to stay in this humiliating position... Everything is set ready, the lamps are pushed in the right position, the light intensity is measured - what is about to happen, I don't know, but the tension is building in my stomach. What's the deal with those dogs?... I feel how the claws of the rough-haired dog are pressing into my sides. I feel how he's panting in my neck, drool from his tongue is dripping on my back. I scream as I feel how he enters me, how his paws clasp me, his nails press into my skin. 'Get him off me', I scream... My cries are lost in an enthusiastic cheer when the dogs lets something wet run down my legs... It was the first photo shoot with dogs in a long line." [55]
Besides having been raped by dogs, X1 also spoke about how Bernard Weinstein, an associate of Dutroux until murdered by him in 1995, and Annie Bouty, the former girlfriend of Nihoul, sometimes walked around with a snake at abuse sessions, which they used to rape the girls with. [56] Sounds hard to believe, doesn't it? However, the pictures above were confiscated from a child abuse network and appeared in the Dutroux dossier. [57] Among the hundreds of photos there are quite a few of children being raped by dogs. There also are two or three photos which show young girls with a snake in their vagina. Sex with other animals is not uncommon either. Following is another example which, according to Regina, happened to her in Knokke when she was 10 years old:
"When the contractions started her [X1's] grandmother made a phone call. The Lippens brothers, Vanden Boeynants and the assistant [police] commissioner of Knokke arrived. De Bonvoisin and Vander Elst arrived thereafter... Vander Elst puts a knife on her throat while Bonvoisin rapes her... She must masturbate while Vander Elst makes a number of photos. Lippens rapes her with a razor blade. When the child exited, de Bonvoisin beat her [multiple times in the face]. Directly after X1 gave birth she was raped and sodomized. Her daughter disappeared six weeks later. She only saw her [daughter] at the factory again." [58]
jmljh
More confiscated pictures from a child abuse network. These pictures are included here because images combined with text give a much more powerful message than words alone. Seeing pictures of the actual abuse really lets the reality and the depravity of these networks sink in (and we aren't even dealing with the worst abuse yet). The pictures are censored so it's harder to make ridiculous claims that these few low quality photos are of any use to aspiring pedophiles. The mainstream Dutch Zembla documentary also included a few pictures of these abuse networks in their documentary, albeit uncensored (a very small child lying underneath a dog, for example). Not sure if that was such a good idea with all those stick-your-head-in-the-sand moral crusaders out there. The DVDs, the relevant documents and any backups of these pictures have been deleted, shredded and thrown out way before this articl