Belgium: Belgian investigators are to renew their questioning of a suspected serial killer on Monday to find out if he killed a girl who worked for him as an au pair, after he confessed to killing nine people.
French forest warden Michel Fourniret returned to prison in Belgium at the weekend after showing police where to dig for the bodies of two girls buried on the grounds of a chateau in France where he used to live with his family.
The bodies found at the Satou chateau, near the Belgian border, are believed to be those of Elisabeth Brichet, a Belgian who disappeared in 1989 at the age of 12, and Frenchwoman Jeanne-Marie Desramault, who vanished the same year at age 22.
French coroners are trying to confirm their identities.
Dubbed by the media as "the Ogre of the Ardennes", the wooded region along the French-Belgian border, the 62-year-old has confessed to kidnapping, raping and strangling Brichet and killing eight other people, most of them young girls.
Television images of Fourniret guiding police in the digging came as France was shaken by the discovery of a dead teenage girl in the nearby Alsace region whose disappearance led to the arrest of a sex offender who had been released from jail.
The two cases come just days after the conviction of 10 people involved in a French child prostitution ring in Saint-Omer in northern France, and the sentencing of Belgium's Marc Dutroux for the kidnap, rape and murder of girls.
Fourniret had been in Belgian custody for the past year on charges of trying to kidnap a girl, but he only confessed last week to the nine killings, allegedly committed between 1987-2001.
Fourniret has rejected his wife's charge that he also killed the girl who worked as an au pair at their home in 1993 in the Belgian town of Sart-Custinne where the family lived after moving out of the chateau.
"One of the main leads . . . is the case of a young girl au pair," Mr Philippe Morandini, spokesman for the Belgian public prosecutor's office in charge of the case, told local RTBF radio. "So we are going to proceed with the interrogation of Mr Fourniret." His wife, Monique Olivier, told investigators last week that the girl's body was buried near the house.
Belgian and French investigators suspect he might have killed even more people.
Fourniret met Olivier, then a prison visitor, while in prison in France from 1983 to 1987 for raping minors. His past was not known by Belgian authorities when he took a job as a school supervisor after leaving France, leading to calls for criminal data to be shared by European countries. - (Reuters)