Political heads roll as a shocked nation reels from a case of police incompetence

By JAMES L. GRAFF /BRUSSELS

he word "surreal" was on every one's lips in Belgium last week--and they weren't talking about the grand Rene Magritte retrospective at Brussels' Museum of Fine Arts. In an embarrassing coda to a tragically mishandled criminal investigation, Belgium's most notorious prisoner, child-rapist and accused murderer, Marc Dutroux, managed to overpower a police guard, steal his pistol, hijack a car, and make a desperate escape toward the French frontier. It turned out that the gun was not loaded. Who needs surrealists when what passes for reality in Belgium is so bizarre?

Dutroux's dash for freedom ended when he was recaptured in the woods after a tense four-hour manhunt. But the episode opened yet another chapter in a galvanizing saga of the government's demonstrable incompetence and suspected corruption. "Stupefying, shocking. Scandalous, shameful. Incredible but true," spluttered the French-language newspaper La Derniere Heure; "Consternation, rage, incredulity, despair," summarized Flemish daily Het Laatste Nieuws.

Dutroux was arrested in August 1996 only after numerous clues pointing to his involvement in a rash of child kidnappings were missed or perhaps willfully ignored. Police freed two girls from a dungeon in a house owned by Dutroux two days after his arrest on August 13, 1996. But two days later they managed only to recover the corpses of his two youngest alleged victims, the eight-year-olds Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo; the bodies of two other alleged victims, An Marchal and Eefje Lambrechts, were found the following month. An exhaustive parliamentary inquiry into the case since then failed to dispel deep public distrust over Belgium's justice system and political culture.

Yet despite Dutroux's demonstrated criminal energy and the immense sensitivity of the case, the prisoner was under the supervision of only two guards while he examined his prosecution file in an unsecured room at the Palace of Justice in Neufchateau. He might have made it to France if his hijacked car hadn't become stuck in mud.

Shortly after Dutroux was recaptured, Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene announced the resignations of Interior Minister Johan Vande Lanotte and Justice Minister Stefaan De Clerck. The ministers are the first state officials at any level to lose their jobs over the monumental bungling of the Dutroux case. They are unlikely to be the last, even if the opposition Liberals do not prevail in their call for an early election.

Firings and demotions will in any case do little to appease the nation's hunger for a full airing of the case. Dutroux's easy escape fueled suspicions that he was helped by officials--although conspiracy theories would have flourished even more richly had he been shot and killed while attempting to escape. Barring new surreal twists, Belgians can still at least hope for some answers when Dutroux goes on trial next year.