Bernard Weinstein

Bernard Weinstein, a national of a European Union country holding a Belgian residence card, lived at Jumet, near Charleroi. In May 1994, after the national employment office suspended his unemployment benefit for 26 weeks, he applied to the Charleroi public welfare center (CPAS) for the minimum income, which he received from May 20 to July 31, 1994; under the welfare-to-work provisions of the CPAS law he then worked as an electrician at the Jumet civil hospital from August 1 to September 15, 1994. The parliamentary commission examined whether he had been protected in obtaining the job, including a letter to him from the then burgomaster of Charleroi informing him that he had been hired as a skilled worker following the burgomaster's intervention; it found that such letters were sent pro forma to everyone hired through the program, that more than 2,000 people were in the same situation, and that there was no evidence of special protection.³

Surveillance, 1995

An informant report of August 10, 1995, said that Marc Dutroux spent much time with a man of about 35 who drove an old blue Ford Fiesta, and a witness to the abduction of Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo at Grâce-Hollogne recognized that type of car.² A report of the gendarmerie's observation unit (POSA) of August 30, 1995, described Weinstein and Dutroux driving to Sars-la-Buissière, where Dutroux took a van, and then to 63 rue Daubresse, where they received a brief visit from a man in a blue Volkswagen Jetta accompanied by a little girl; the Fiesta then took Dutroux back to Marcinelle. On September 4 the gendarme Rene Michaux identified Weinstein as the Fiesta's owner in the national register. The commission found that Michaux had received very important information on Weinstein up to three times in a month and had limited himself to a simple identification, "contrary to the most elementary police logic," despite "the worrying appearance of a little girl" with Dutroux and Weinstein.³

On November 5, 1995, at Jumet, Dutroux and Weinstein were involved in the theft and sequestration of three adults, the subject of a file of the Charleroi investigating judge Lorent against both men. On the night of November 4 to 5 the Charleroi municipal police freed the sequestered people from the chalet next to Weinstein's own uninhabitable one, which he occupied, and an officer found audio cassettes there, one of them a recording of a television news broadcast on the disappearance of Julie and Melissa; having nothing to link Weinstein to child abductions, the police left the cassettes in place.³ When Dutroux was arrested on December 13, 1995, Weinstein was listed as a fugitive and reported to the national criminal intelligence bureau.²

Death

Weinstein's body was found at Dutroux's property at Sars-la-Buissière, where the bodies of Julie and Melissa were found in August 1996.⁴ At the trial in Arlon, Dutroux asked for "justice" for his friend Weinstein, who he said had been killed by one Gérard Pinon; on June 17, 2004, the jury found that Dutroux himself had sequestered, tortured and murdered him.⁵ Dutroux also said at the trial that Weinstein and Michel Lelievre had come to take away An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks from his house in 1995.⁶

The Cabin Note and the Video Work

The writer S. Dovey wrote that Weinstein came to Belgium from France in the early 1990s and witnessed the abuse of An and Eefje at Marcinelle, that Dutroux drugged him on a fishing trip in November 1995 and buried him alive, and that he worked copying videos for SPRL Video Promotion in Charleroi. Dovey also wrote that a note addressed to him and signed "Anubis," found in his cabin, referring to a "feast" with a "high priestess present," linked him to the Abrasax Institute of Francis Desmedt, raided in December 1996, and counted his death among more than twenty deaths of witnesses in the affair, including that of Gina Pardaens-Bernaer, and connected to the network of Jean-Michel Nihoul and his company ASCO.¹