Operation Othello

Operation Othello was the observation of Marc Dutroux by the gendarmerie of Charleroi in 1995. The Charleroi gendarmerie had passed information on Dutroux as a suspect to the gendarmerie of Liège, investigating the abduction of Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo, from July 7, 1995, and a confidential report of August 10 recorded two informants' accounts that Dutroux had spoken of selling girls for 100,000 to 150,000 francs and of fitting out his cellars as hiding places for abducted children.¹ On August 25, 1995, Commandant Legros submitted the request for the observation action "Othello" to the first deputy prosecutor at Charleroi, Mrs. Robert. The gendarme Rene Michaux ran the operation.²

The Observations

A report of the gendarmerie observation unit (POSA) of August 30, 1995, followed Dutroux and Bernard Weinstein in Weinstein's blue Ford Fiesta, the type of car described by the informants and recognized by a witness to the abduction at Grâce-Hollogne, to Sars-la-Buissière and to 63 rue Daubresse in Jumet, where a man in a blue Volkswagen Jetta paid a brief visit accompanied by a little girl. Michaux identified the Fiesta's owner as Weinstein on September 4 and went no further, which the commission called "contrary to the most elementary police logic." The gendarmerie of Thuin, in whose district Dutroux's wife, Michelle Martin, lived at Sars-la-Buissière, complained that the POSA observations were limited and made largely in daytime and that Charleroi did not exploit them.¹²

On the night of November 4 to 5, 1995, the Charleroi municipal police freed people sequestered in the chalet next to Weinstein's, which he occupied, on the rue Daubresse. An officer found audio cassettes and an old recorder; one cassette held a recording of a television news broadcast on the disappearance of Julie and Melissa. Having nothing to connect Weinstein to child abductions, the police left the cassettes in place. At the request of De Windt, relaying a request from Michaux, Martin later went to the Charleroi police to collect various objects, including boxes of audio cassettes. The commission could not determine what became of the cassette.²

The Searches of December 1995

On December 9, 1995, the Charleroi police intercepted Dutroux over robberies with violence and the sequestration of two accomplices, whom he had drugged, and of the wife of one of them, whom he had tied to a chair and filmed. The investigating judge ordered searches of his homes, and the gendarmerie, which informed the judge of the abduction suspicions it had received, was given nine searches. According to the computer records of the national criminal intelligence bureau (BCR), Commandants Legros and Schot telephoned the BCR at eleven in the morning of December 13, during the search at Marcinelle; Schot reported that some fifty videocassettes had been seized, each ending with pornographic scenes filmed live, "to be checked (victim recognizable???)." The inventory of December 14 marked with asterisks four cassettes whose titles had a sexual connotation, although it listed many more with sexual and even pedophile connotations. The gendarmerie reported that work was being done in the cellars, but "without any connection" with "the fitting out of transit cells for the abduction of children." On January 9, 1996, Michaux informed Lesage by fax that Othello had been negative, before the examination of the videocassettes was complete. Dutroux was released on March 20, 1996.¹²

In July 1997 the commission received information that the wife of a Charleroi lawyer had said in August 1995 that the Charleroi BSR knew the girls were in a house in Marcinelle but that the gendarmes did not dare go in because the abductors were well protected in a car-trafficking ring worth billions of francs; its checks found the information to be inaccurate.²

Claude Thirault

The writer S. Dovey wrote that the handyman Claude Thirault came forward through Othello with information about the cellar Dutroux had commissioned him to build.³