Nihoul, "a Brussels businessman, pub-owner and familiar face at sex parties,"[3] was initially tried as an accomplice to the kidnappings but was acquitted owing to insufficient evidence; he was instead convicted of involvement in a gang that participated in human and drug trafficking, and was sentenced to five years in prison.

After Burundi gained independence in mid-1962, Dutroux's family moved back to Belgium and settled in the village of Obaix in Hainaut Province.

The marriage was marred by Dutroux's abusive behaviour towards his family; the couple would divorce in 1983, with Françoise keeping custody of the children.

[citation needed] During the late 1970s, Dutroux found new employment as a scrap dealer and supplemented his income by stealing car parts.

[citation needed] From 1979 onward he was convicted for a variety of petty offences including assault, drug dealing, and trading stolen vehicles.

[citation needed] Meanwhile, he regularly visited ice skating rinks in Charleroi, Forest, and Montignies-sur-Sambre, where he would deliberately trip or bump into young female skaters in order to touch them.

[13][14] On 24 June 1995, eight-year-old classmates Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo were kidnapped after going for a walk in Grâce-Hollogne, probably by Dutroux,[15] and brought to his house in Marcinelle.

Two months later, in the early hours of 23 August in Ostend, Dutroux and accomplice Michel Lelièvre kidnapped An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks, two teenage girls from Hasselt[16] who were on their way back to their holiday home in Westende following a night out in Blankenberge.

In September, according to Martin, Lambrecks and Marchal were drugged and brought to Jumet, where Dutroux and accomplice Bernard Weinstein killed them by burying them alive.

[28] In a book originally published under the title J'avais 12 ans, j'ai pris mon vélo et je suis partie à l'école[29] (and published in the United Kingdom under the title I Choose to Live), Dardenne described her time in captivity in Dutroux's Marcinelle home, where she spent most of the time imprisoned in the dungeon and was starved and repeatedly raped by Dutroux.

That same day, Dutroux led the police to the basement dungeon inside which Dardenne and Delhez were imprisoned; the girls were subsequently rescued.

[37] Hundreds of commercial adult pornographic videos, along with a large number of home-made sex films that Dutroux had made with Martin, were recovered from his properties.

[39] After Lejeune and Russo were kidnapped in June 1995, it took police 14 months to arrest Dutroux, although he had been a prime suspect from the start, having committed similar crimes before.

[41] In October 1996, judge Jean-Marc Connerotte was removed from the investigation by the Supreme Court due to concerns about his impartiality after he attended a fund-raising dinner for the victims' families.

Judge Langlois refused to have them tested for DNA evidence even though the leading police investigator, Michel Bourlet, had begged him to have them analyzed in order to know whether more people besides Dutroux were involved.

[44] Eventually several families of victims boycotted the official trial, stating that it was a circus and there had been no progress in the case since the removal of judge Connerotte.

The prosecutor general of Liege, Cedric Visart de Bocarme, said, "There is some true, some false, some very disparate information here, involving some people who have done nothing wrong, who have simply been mentioned in an investigation and are thus exposed to public contempt, whereas all this material should have remained classified.

[51] The Guardian reported in 2004 that "the entire credibility of the current reformist government of Guy Verhofstadt and Belgium's very reputation as a normal civilised country is on the line.

In the first week of the trial, photos of Dutroux's face were not allowed to be printed in Belgian newspapers for privacy reasons; this ban remained in force until 9 March.

[57] In a rare move, the jury at the assizes trial publicly protested the presiding judge Stéphane Goux's handling of the debates and the victims' testimonies.

[72] He insisted that he was "no longer dangerous" and wanted to be released into house arrest with an electronic tag (ankle bracelet) placed upon him.

[81] In May 2010 the Belgian prosecutor's office dropped all charges against Nihoul relating to participation in a paedophile ring in the absence of any tangible evidence.

[83] Belief in a paedophile network which included high-ranking members of the Belgian establishment and a conspiracy to keep it hidden became widespread in Belgium.

[43] Press reports claimed that, prior to his removal, Connerotte was on the verge of publicly disclosing the names of high-level government officials who had been recognized on video-tapes.

[50] Connerotte had said that the businessman Michel Nihoul was the brains behind the child kidnapping operation, and would testify in the trial that there had been high-level murder plots to stop his investigation.

[45][3] Investigators also believed that Dutroux and Nihoul were planning on a long-distance prostitution trafficking network involving cars and the import of girls from Slovakia, though no evidence of this was ever uncovered.

Documents released by WikiLeaks show that large sums of money in different currencies arrived in Michelle Martin's bank account, and claimed to be linked in time to the disappearances of the abducted girls.

[86] Other X witnesses recounted instances where children were chased through the woods with Dobermans, or told of gatherings that involved sex orgies with minors, torture and murder with a secretary general of NATO present.

[86] Three journalists later wrote a book called The X-Files: What Belgium Was Not Supposed to Know About the Dutroux Affair, that claimed that the X witnesses were much more believable than stated by the media.

Frenkiel's article alleges that Tagliaferro's wife, Fabienne Jaupart, who was determined to find her husband's killer, was reportedly found dead as well after her mattress had been set on fire.