Christians Under Attack

The remains of Stacy Lemmens, 7, and Nathalie Mahy, 10, were found 10 meters (yards) apart stuffed into a storm sewer covered by thick undergrowth alongside a railroad line running through this gritty eastern steel town, investigators said.

The spot was just a few hundred meters (yards) from a cafe where the girls had been with parents before heading out to play during a late-night street party. Nathalie's mother -- the partner of Stacy's father -- noticed the girls were missing around 3 a.m. on June 10 when she left the cafe to collect them.

A convicted child rapist, Abdallah Aid Oud, 39, has been charged with the girls' kidnapping. He has been held by police since handing himself in on June 13. A local man, whose parents are of North African descent, he denies any involvement in their disappearance.

Aid Oud was the boyfriend of a waitress in the cafe visited by the girls and police say he was in the area the night they went missing. He was released from a secure psychiatric unit in December after serving a second sentence for child-sex offenses.

Liege Prosecutor Cedric Visart de Bocarme said there were no other suspects. "The next hours and days will tell whether there is proof to link the crimes with the suspect," he told reporters.

For Belgium, the gruesome discovery revived painful memories of the Dutroux case.

A convicted pedophile, Dutroux snatched two 8-year-olds Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo from a Liege street in 1985, held them for months, before allowing them to starve to death locked in a basement while he served time for a minor offense.

"In all our hearts there is a feeling of repugnance, of sorrow and powerlessness," Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt said in a televised address to the nation. "We cannot comprehend what motivates these people." Crown Prince Philippe, the heir to the Belgian throne, said he was scaling back a trade visit to Moscow as a sign of respect. "As parents ourselves we want to express our feelings with the parents," he told reporters in the Russian capital.

"It's a new black day for Belgium," said Elio di Rupo, premier of Belgium's French-speaking Wallonia region.

Scores of mourners placed flowers, teddy bears and white balloons on a bridge over the railroad near where the bodies were found.

White balloons were the symbol of a campaign that drew hundreds of thousands of protesters intothe streets of Belgium cities in the 1990s to demand reforms of the justice system after revelations of bungling in the Dutroux case. He was finally sentenced to life in 2004 for a string of murders, rapes and kidnaps.

This time, there were few complaints about the investigation.

Hundreds of officers were mobilized and a nationwide manhunt was launched for Aid Oud shortly after the girls' disappearance.

Jean-Denis Lejeune, father of Dutroux' victim Julie, drove to Liege to comfort the bereaved parents. After his daughter's killing he helped found a missing children agency which distributed tens of thousands of posters that spread Stacy's and Nathalie's picture around the country.

Results of autopsies were expected Thursday to reveal the cause of death.

A court is expected to decide Thursday whether to keep Aid Oud in custody. His lawyers are demanding he be set free arguing there is no evidence to link him to the crimes.

In a strange twist, police were studying an anonymous letter received Wednesday by the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf which contained two maps showing where the bodies of the two girls could be found. In a report on its Web site, the paper said the maps, sent from Rotterdam, indicated a spot about 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) from the spot where they were found, but along the same rail line.

"We received a letter with a map on it that could be interesting for this investigation, so we've passed it on to our colleagues in Belgium," said Amsterdam police spokesman Gerard Vrooland.

2006 OhmyNews