Michel Bourlet

Michel Bourlet was the procureur du Roi (King's prosecutor) at Neufchâteau during the investigation of Marc Dutroux opened after the abduction of Laetitia Delhez in August 1996, and worked the file alongside the investigating judge Jean-Marc Connerotte. The parliamentary commission noted that Bourlet and Connerotte had preferred, in the past and at the time, to work directly with the investigators rather than through the command of the investigation unit.²

After Connerotte's replacement by Jacques Langlois in October 1996, the families of the missing children continued to meet Bourlet, whom they trusted, rather than Langlois. On October 24, 1997, Anne Thily, prosecutor-general at the court of appeal in Liège, wrote to Bourlet in a letter marked "personal and confidential" asking him to stop all contact with the press and, temporarily, with the parents of the missing children except on the parts of the files concerning them; the commission found that the families were thereby partly deprived of information on the investigation.²

In January 1998, amid a press campaign against the witness X1, Regina Louf, fed by leaks from police and judicial circles, the Liège prosecutor-general opened a series of investigations into the leaks, in the course of which Bourlet's telephone was placed under surveillance. At least one officer of the judicial police was charged, in a case said in 2000 to be under examination in the Namur judicial district. The Belgian Senate proposal of 2000 asked what the leak inquiry had found, whom it had charged, and whether the leaks had been intended to protect particular participants in the investigation.³

The X-Dossier

Bourlet led the team that examined the testimony of eight X-witnesses who came forward after Connerotte's appeal, compiled as the X-Dossier. It concerned orgies, hunts 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, behind Golfpad 4, frequented by Paul Vanden Boeynants and the Lippens family, in the Ardennes, and at the estates of Baron Benoit de Bonvoisin, Count Leopold Lippens and Count Maurice Auguste Lippens, and snuff films at the ASCO Industries NV factory owned by Roger Boas. The team matched X1's account of "Chrissie" to the 1984 murder of Christine Van Hees, which she described as committed by Dutroux, Jean-Michel Nihoul, Bernard Weinstein and the lawyer Michel Vander Elst, and her account of "Clo," traced through a school yearbook, to the 1983 death of Carine Dellaert, found in a septic tank, whose autopsy found laminaria sticks and gauze; X1 described a childbirth and a gang rape involving Nihoul, Jean-Paul Dumont and Leopold Lippens. X2 named de Bonvoisin, Dumont and Lippens at sadomasochistic events near Chimay and described orgies at the Mirano club with Princes Philippe and Laurent; X3 described abuse at the castles of Prince Charles, King Baudouin and King Albert between 1950 and 1962; X4 identified X1's friends in pornographic films. The team examined the 1991 disappearance of Katrien de Cuyper and the X-Kiss studio in Antwerp, linked to Zandvoort through Gerrit-Jan Ulrich and Robbie Van Der Plancken; a list by Serge Heylens naming Beat Meier, Edward Brongersma and Philippe Carpentier of CRIES; Dumont's representation of CRIES, whose members used basements of UNICEF for filming, with links through Joseph Douce and Michel Caignet's Gaie France to Spartacus International; hierarchies involving Paul Martens and Christian Social Party politicians backed by the Societe Generale de Banque; and the Abrasax Institute, raided after a note signed "Anubis" was found in Weinstein's cabin, which included police members. Chantal Storme corroborated X1's account of the brothel. The investigation also found more than twenty calls between Dutroux and Nihoul around Laetitia's abduction, financial trails to accounts in Europe, and violent pornographic tapes at Nihoul's home.¹

Bourlet's team was replaced in 1997 after accusations that it had fed details to X1, and investigators were charged and cleared in 1999. The dossier was leaked to Flemish journalists and published in 1999 as De X-dossiers, and King Albert sued in 2001. A summary of 1,235 pages, prepared for the 2004 trial, described 300 violent tapes from Nihoul's home, some with members of the elite, and was leaked through WikiLeaks in 2009. More than twenty witnesses died during the investigation, among them Gina Pardaens-Bernaer, who had identified Dutroux-linked material on Apollo Disks, and Hubert Massa, by suicide in 1998. The accused were linked to Operation Gladio networks, and Melchior Wathelet sat on the European Court of Justice. The 2004 trial did not hear the X-witnesses; Bourlet criticized the acquittals and called for cases such as Dellaert's to be reopened.¹