Confession of French sex killer evokes shadow of Dutroux

A French forest worker has confessed to murdering six girls near the Franco-Belgian border over the past 15 years, in a case that will inevitably generate comparisons with the Dutroux affair.

A French forest worker has confessed to murdering six girls near the Franco-Belgian border over the past 15 years, in a case that will inevitably generate comparisons with the Dutroux affair.

Michel Fourniret, 62, who moved to Belgium after serving a jail sentence for rape in France, had admitted six murders, investigators said yesterday, but might be responsible for at least three other sexually- motivated killings of girls and women. One of the victims worked as his au pair, looking after his son.

The public prosecutor in the Dinant area of the Belgian Ardennes, Arnoud d'Aspremont-Lynden, said Fourniret had confessed after his estranged wife, Monique, admitted being present when several teenage girls were killed between 1989 and 1996. She told prosecutors he had killed nine times.

"He would say to his wife: 'I'm going hunting. So there you have it, I'm going out and you know very well that it means that I'm going to look for a young girl, pretty, maybe virgin,'" another public prosecutor, Anne Thily, told reporters. "Then he brought her home, kept her two or three days, raped her ... and then strangled her."

Fourniret was arrested last year after a failed attempt to abduct another girl in the village of Ciney, near Dinant. His intended victim, aged 13, escaped from the back of his van and gave the police evidence that led them to Fourniret's house in the village of Sart-Custinne, close to the French border, where he lived with his wife and son. Until his wife's confession Fourniret had, however, denied any involvement in other crimes.

A former forest warden in the French Ardennes, it appears that Fourniret used his knowledge of small roads criss- crossing the border to commit murders in both countries after he moved to Belgium, and his knowledge of the woodland to hide the bodies. Several have never been found.

Among the crimes to which he reportedly confessed yesterday was the kidnap and murder of 12-year-old Elisabeth Brichert in Namur in Belgium in 1989. Elisabeth's father, Francis, told Belgian television yesterday: "I breathe a little easier. It's been 15 years that we've been chasing false leads. ... I hope that we have found the right one ... [but] nothing is finished. We still have to know where she and the others can be found."

A court in Arlon last week sent Marc Dutroux to life in prison after a three-month trial for kidnapping and raping six girls and killing four of them. It now appears that two serial sex killers were preying on girls in broadly the same area of southern Belgium at the same time.

Belgian and French police had been trying to link Fourniret to two other murders after finding the bodies of two French girls in the Belgian Ardennes last year. It was only with his wife's confession that the apparent scale of his crimes became apparent.

Fourniret used to live in the French Ardennes near Sedan. After serving only two years of a seven-year sentence for rape in France, he moved with his wife and son to the village on the Belgian side of the border.

Prosecutors said Fourniret had also confessed to the murder of 18-year-old Céline Saison, at Charleville-Mézières, in the French Ardenees, in May 2000 and Mananya Thumpong, 14, who was kidnapped in the centre of Sedan in May 2001 and found raped and murdered at Nollevaux in the Belgian Ardennes.