An Marchal

An Marchal, aged seventeen, of Hasselt, disappeared with her friend Eefje Lambrecks, aged nineteen, on the Belgian coast on August 22, 1995, on their way back from a hypnosis show at Ostend. The police at Westende did not treat their friends' report of August 23 as serious, and the national criminal intelligence bureau issued a non-urgent notice on August 24; the police at Hasselt acted at once on her parents' report.¹²

Their bodies were found on September 3, 1996, in a pit under a shed at Jumet.² At the trial Marc Dutroux said the two had been taken, with Michel Lelievre, "for Nihoul's network," held chained on the first floor of his house at Marcinelle for fifteen days, and then taken away by Bernard Weinstein and Lelièvre; the pathologists found that both had died of advanced malnutrition.² On June 17, 2004, the jury convicted Dutroux of the murders of An and Eefje and Lelièvre, who admitted the abduction, of her abduction and sequestration with the aggravating circumstance of torture causing death. Jean-Michel Nihoul was acquitted of the abduction charges; the jury set aside the "network" thesis argued by the prosecution and by the Marchal family's lawyers. Her father, Paul Marchal, said: "They are guilty of everything, even the killings, even the torture."³⁴

The gendarme Rene Michaux, who ran the surveillance operation Operation Othello, searched Dutroux's house in December 1995 and did not find the concealed cellar.⁵