A Protestant pastor has been charged with the murder of two of his former wives and four of his eight children and may have had other victims, the prosecutor's office in Brussels said yesterday.
"It seems probable that there were other victims," the deputy prosecutor, Mr Jos Colpin, said after the pastor, Mr Andreas Pandy (70), was formally indicted for the murder of the two women and four daughters between 1986 and 1989. He was placed in solitary confinement.
"We are afraid we may find more corpses," Mr Colpin said.
The charges against the clergyman followed the discovery on Saturday of a human leg, a hip and pieces of skull under a concrete floor at one of his two properties in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek.
Mr Pandy, who was born in Hungary but has lived and worked in Belgium since 1957, was arrested the same day.
He denied any knowledge of the remains when taken to the house.
Further searches of both properties yesterday also uncovered pieces of flesh in the refrigerators of the two properties. The flesh is as yet unidentified.
"Traces of blood were found in an elevator cage," Mr Colpin said, An urn which seemed to contain human ashes was also found.
Mr Colpin added that Mr Pandy - who is denying he committed any crime - has claimed the ashes are those of his sister who died in Hungary in 1994.
In events that had a horrifying echo of last year's search for the child victims of the paedophile, Marc Dutroux, extensive digging was carried out at the first Molenbeek house yesterday. The other house, and a property in central Brussels were also searched.
There was no official confirmation of reports that a surviving daughter of Mr Pandy's had accused him of sexual abuse.
The two ex-wives and his four girls were reported missing more than 10 years ago, but Mr Pandy had always claimed they had gone overseas and he provided letters to support his claim.
Investigators initially accepted his explanations only to discover them to be false when the inquiry was reopened last year in the wake of angry public criticism of the role of the country's police and judicial system in the Dutroux cases.
Dutroux was arrested last year and is accused of abducting and imprisoning six Belgian girls and murdering four of them between June 1995 and August 1996.
In April, a parliamentary commission called for the dismissal of the Brussels crown prosecutor, Mr Benoit Dejemeppe, accused of incompetence following the disappearance of a Moroccan girl, Loubna Benaissa. She was a victim of another convicted paedophile, Patrick Derochette.
Reacting to the commission's report, magistrates decided in May to reopen all unsolved disappearances of children and adults. Belgian police were reported to have contacted their Hungarian counterparts in relation to the charges against Mr Pandy.