BELGIUM: A woman who as a 12-year-old was kidnapped and repeatedly raped by the alleged child-killer Marc Dutroux testified against him in a Belgian courtroom yesterday.
After giving a detailed account of her kidnap and six-week-long imprisonment, Ms Sabine Dardenne, now aged 20, asked Dutroux: "Why didn't you kill me?"
Her testimony was so disturbing that two parents of Dutroux's victims had to be taken from the courtroom to hospital.
Dutroux's ex-wife, Michelle Martin, who is also on trial with him, asked Sabine to forgive her. Ms Dardenne replied: "You, as mother of a family, knew where I was, with whom and what he did. Your apology I do not accept."
Ms Dardenne told the court how on May 29th, 1996, she was cycling to school in the village of Kain, on the outskirts of Tournai. She was grabbed by Dutroux and his accomplice Michel Lelièvre, who bundled her with her school satchel and her bike into the back of a van.
Although drugged she was aware of being taken along a motorway.
Later she was forced to climb into a steel trunk and in that she was carried from the van into a house. Dutroux took her clothes off and chained her by the neck to a bed.
During her captivity, Dutroux told her that he was shielding her from his angry boss, who had demanded a ransom from her parents for her release. But Dutroux also told her that she was his new woman and from the very first day began to abuse her sexually.
Mostly she was locked in the cellar with her exercise books, her diary and her PlayStation. She was given tinned food, bread and dried biscuits.
Dutroux told her the cellar was a safer hiding place from his angry boss. She wrote numerous letters to her parents, which Dutroux pretended he would send.
The letters, some of which were read out during the trial last week, detail the sexual abuse, though she was not called to testify about that yesterday.
Ms Dardenne admitted that she herself had asked Dutroux for some company. She was bored after learning all her lessons and writing over all her exercise books. "I didn't know that he was going to kidnap someone else," she said.
Dutroux kidnapped Laetitia Delhez, the second of his two surviving victims, who will take the stand today.
It was her kidnap which finally led the police to Dutroux and his house in Charleroi.
Ms Dardenne explained that when 81 days after her kidnap, the police arrived with Dutroux, she thought "they had all come to kill me".
"I said to myself: it is two and a half months that I have been here. I have such a bad character. It is all over for me."
When Dutroux arrived at the doorway, the girls did not dare come out, until Laetitia recognised one of the men as a policeman. "But when I came out I thanked Dutroux. I thought he had saved us," said Ms Dardenne.
"I was mad enough to believe it."
At the end of her half-hour testimony, Ms Dardenne said: "I would like to ask one thing of Marc Dutroux . . . I would like to know, coming from him, who repeatedly complained of my bad character, why he did not kill me." Dutroux, who denies killing four other girls, aged between 8 and 19, said that he never had any intention of killing her.
"I admit abusing her and I carry the responsibility for that," he told the court. "That is not a very convincing as an answer," said Ms Dardenne.
Her testimony did not support conspiracy theories suggesting Dutroux was part of a network of paedophiles.
She testified that she saw no one other than Dutroux during her captivity.
The mother of Laetitia Delhez was taken to hospital but released later.
The father of An Marchal, who it is alleged was killed by Dutroux, was kept in hospital for observation.