An accomplice of infamous serial child rapist and murderer Marc Dutroux will request his release under electronic surveillance as he prepares to serve the final years of his sentence.
Michel Lelièvre is expected to appear before a criminal enforcement court on 17 September to renew a request to be released with an ankle bracelet, De Standaard reports.
Sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2004, Lelièvre has been detained since 1996, after authorities placed him in pre-trial detention for his involvement in a criminal case which shocked Belgium in the 1990s, known as the Dutroux affair.
Between 1995 and 1996, Marc Dutroux abducted and raped six girls aged between 8 and 19, and held them in a cellar where he repeatedly raped and tortured them.
He murdered his two oldest victims, 17-year-old An Marchal and 19-year-old Eefje Lambrecks. Two others, Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo, both eight, died of starvation in his cellar.
Survivors Sabine Dardenne and Laetitia Delhez, aged 12 and 14 respectively at the time, were rescued by police after Dutroux and Lelièvre were arrested.
During the investigation, prosecutors concluded that Dutroux, assisted by his ex-wife and accomplice Michelle Martin, produced child pornography by abusing his victims.
Lelièvre confessed to playing an active role in the abductions of four girls, those of the deceased Marchal and Lambrecks, as well as in the abduction of survivors Dardenne and Delhez.
Lelièvre will serve out his full sentence in two years time, in preparation of which he will renew a request to serve it out under electronic surveillance after an initial one was denied in September of last year because he had no known address.
Dutroux is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, and his ex-wife Martin was conditionally released in 2012.
Bernard Weinstein, a fourth accomplice, involved in the murder of the two oldest victims, is thought to have been murdered by Dutroux.
Gabriela Galindo
The Brussels Times
