Jean-Marc Connerotte

Jean-Marc Connerotte was the investigating judge at Neufchâteau in the file on the abduction of Laetitia Delhez, taken at Bertrix on August 9, 1996. Marc Dutroux, his wife Michelle Martin and Michel Lelievre were arrested on August 12; on August 15 Dutroux confessed, and on his directions Laetitia and Sabine Dardenne were found alive in the cellar of his house at Marcinelle. The bodies of Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo were found at Sars-la-Buissière on August 17.² The parliamentary commission noted that Connerotte and the Neufchâteau prosecutor, Michel Bourlet, preferred to work directly with the investigators rather than through the command of the investigation unit, in contrast to the more formal practice of his successor.³

The Hotline and X1

After the girls were freed, Connerotte opened a free telephone line for witnesses of child abuse and people with information on Dutroux and his associates. A Dutch-speaking woman called to say that a friend knew a great deal about grave abuse of children; the gendarme Patrick De Baets, who was in Connerotte's office to report on his financial investigation of Dutroux's assets, took the call because of the language. The caller, Tania, was a friend of the witness later known as X1, Regina Louf; the call was the starting point of the so-called connected files. A special unit of the Brussels criminal investigation brigade (BSR) under De Baets was set up to question X1. One of her accounts led the investigators to the unsolved 1984 murder of Christine Van Hees.⁴

Removal

In October 1996, after what became known as the "spaghetti ruling" of the Court of Cassation, Connerotte was replaced as investigating judge by Jacques Langlois. Shortly before he was removed, he opened a second telephone line for information on sexual abuse of children; whether Langlois ever acted on what it produced was still without a precise answer in 2000.⁴ In June 1997 the Brussels investigating judge Jean-Claude Van Espen, who held the Van Hees file, suspended all investigative acts by the team re-examining it.⁵

The X-Witnesses

After a public appeal by Connerotte in September 1996, eight witnesses gave testimony alleging abuse by members of the elite, compiled as the X-Dossier under Bourlet. The testimony described orgies and murders at villas in Knokke-Heist near the Royal Zoute Golf Club, at the brothel of X1's grandmother Cecile Beernaert at Elizabetlaan 83 frequented by Paul Vanden Boeynants, and at estates of Baron Benoit de Bonvoisin, Count Leopold Lippens and Count Maurice Auguste Lippens. The team matched X1's account of Van Hees's murder to unpublished details, and her account of a friend, "Clo," to the 1983 death of Carine Dellaert, identified through a yearbook, whose autopsy found laminaria sticks and gauze. X2 named de Bonvoisin, Jean-Paul Dumont and Lippens at sadomasochistic events near Chimay; X3 described abuse at royal castles between 1950 and 1962; X4 identified pornographic films featuring X1's friends. X2 also described orgies at the Mirano club attended by Princes Philippe and Laurent. The dossier mapped politicians of the Christian Social Party backed by the Societe Generale de Banque, and described Dumont as representing CRIES, which used UNICEF in the production of pornography through Joseph Douce and Michel Caignet's Gaie France; X1 described hunts and snuff films at ASCO Industries NV, owned by Roger Boas. A 2005 summary of the file, later leaked through WikiLeaks, described 300 tapes, some featuring members of the elite. The accused were linked to Operation Gladio networks, and one of them, Melchior Wathelet, sat on the European Court of Justice. The investigation followed Jean-Michel Nihoul's parties, more than twenty calls between Nihoul and Dutroux around Laetitia's abduction, vans of Nihoul's company ASCO, and some 300 violent pornographic tapes seized from Nihoul's home. It examined the 1991 disappearance of Katrien de Cuyper and the X-Kiss studio, linked through Gerrit-Jan Ulrich and Robbie Van Der Plancken to Zandvoort, and a list compiled by Serge Heylens that included Beat Meier, Edward Brongersma and Philippe Carpentier of CRIES; after a note signed "Anubis" was found in Bernard Weinstein's cabin, the Abrasax Institute was raided and found to include police members. More than twenty witnesses died in the period, among them Gina Pardaens-Bernaer in 1998, after identifying Dutroux-linked material on Apollo Disks. Connerotte was cleared of bias in 1999; in 2004 he testified that contracts had been taken out on the lives of magistrates, who needed bulletproof vehicles. The dossier was leaked and published in 1999 as De X-dossiers.¹