Picture by Jan Rosseel, from “Belgian Autumn”

[2025-06-16] Blue Rose Reports — In the first part of THE MISSING PIECES, I talked about how I wanted to look into the unknown areas surrounding the Dutroux affair. The shadows. The first entry in this series sets the tone for what we’re going to be dealing with. If you haven’t read it yet, you can check it out here :

This time, we’re going to take a look at a story told to us by a retired Belgian gendarme, Marc Toussaint. We’ll go from the dirty 80s in Brussels, in the wake of the Brabant Killers and the Haemers gang attacks, to the X witnesses investigation in the late 90s. Not everything will be covered in this part, PART III will finish the story. If you’re wondering why we’ll cover such a wide variety of cases all at once, it’s because they will assemble, forming an intricate web of people and networks, showcasing how child trafficking and prostitution operated together, culminating in the shadows of the Dutroux-Nihoul affair. That’s why it is such a special story, and one that has stayed unknown in the English language, for a lack of translation. After reading this, the revelation that Dutroux might have just been a cog in a larger machine should come to you as no surprise.

Marc Toussaint worked as a gendarme in Uccle, a municipality of Brussels, Belgium’s capital. During his career, he was at one point part of the Belgian Royal Escort, the horse escort for the Belgian royal family. Toussaint wrote a book with the help of Xavier Rossey, a Belgian journalist. Called Tous manipulés? Avant, pendant, après l’affaire Dutroux (Were we all manipulated? Before, During, After the Dutroux Affair, in English), it is a great read and a great source for the Dutroux case, and I will be quoting it extensively in this piece. It’s the entire base for this story. If the source isn’t mentioned or there isn’t any footnote leading to a specific set of pages, it comes from that book. Toussaint’s sources, if outside of his gendarmerie investigation, will be mentioned. Otherwise, assume everything comes from police reports filed and quoted by Marc Toussaint, in his own book. Also, I mentioned the bit about him working for the Belgian royal family as a gendarme escort simply because Toussaint makes it known in his book that he doesn’t believe the Belgian royal family could have been involved in the Belgian X files, where X witnesses mention one member, former Prince and King, Albert II1. It’s his personal opinion and I disagree, but it doesn’t diminish the quality of his work. Toussaint has his own opinion about the X witnesses as well, we’ll get to talk about it in PART III.

Scan of my copy of Tous manipulés?, with the hand at the top of the cover doing the manipulating, wearing a gendarmerie uniform

Marc Toussaint (holding the mic) and Xavier Rossey (Dossiers Secrets d’État)

We’ll see how Marc Toussaint’s investigation into the Institut Bizaar, a front for a prostitution network, led him to work clandestinely for the Neufchâteau investigation cell of the Dutroux affair. After the White March of October 20th 1996, Toussaint got involved in the “White Comittees”, a series of local initiatives set up as mostly politically neutral and anti-corruption movements, a continuation of the White March. The goal was to deeply change Belgian society after the Dutroux affair and the numerous missing children cases. They were short lived because of the infighting and the lack of concrete goals or politics, as well as casual citizens leaving after a while, with only a few “die hards” remaining. Not to mention these were independent organisations, and so whoever formed it for their municipality would be in charge, and anybody could set up their chapter, with the parents of missing and dead children not being involved in any way with some of these groups. This also made it where it was easy to infiltrate any White Committee and sow dissent, accusing people of being pedophiles without any proof or simply throwing an egocentric fit.

A demonstration held by two White Commitees (Belga)

Toussaint started as a gendarme in 1986, right after the Brabant Killers shook Belgian society. He joined the Uccle (Brussels) gendarmerie in 1994. His investigation into the world of prostitution networks starts in early 1995, with a man called Farid Riffi. Farid reports to Toussaint that he’s being falsely accused of pimping two women, and so he wants to claim a file against them. One of them is named Bernadette Lepièce. Toussaint thinks this is a ruse to take legal advantage over the girls, and it seems like his intuition is right : the other woman, Sonia has previously reported him as a pimp, and Farid has files opened at other police stations. Toussaint then decides to look into him, learning that Farid’s lawyer is none other than Étienne Delhuvenne, a well known name in the prostitution milieu, but he doesn’t know that yet. Delhuvenne and his client Farid are involved together in a cooperative company, they sell drinks out of a small cabin called the Pavillon Malou, situated in one of Brussels’s parks, near a kids play area. It’s mostly used on weekends and on holidays by the local children and their parents, but Toussaint picks up interesting testimonies about BDSM parties being organized secretly at the cabin. We’ll get back to that in a bit.

Marc Toussaint starts looking into the people close to Farid and Delhuvenne. Toussaint auditions Bernadette Lepièce, mentioned earlier, who had Étienne Delhuvenne as a boyfriend and pimp until she reported him to the police in 1990. Since then, she’s been pressured to stop talking and denouncing him, with Farid harassing her over the phone. Bernadette worked for a very specific prostitution network in Belgium, one active in the 70s and 80s, know as the Fortunato-Montaricourt network, or Le Cercle de Tuna, Tuna’s Circle in English2. It was named after Fortuna “Tuna” Israel and Lydia Montaricourt, the two consecutive owners of this network. A whole article could be written about this specific network and so I’ll keep it concise. The Fortunato-Montaricourt prostitution network was used as a means for a Belgian consortium to secure building contracts in Saudi Arabia3. Called EuroSystem Hospitalier (ESH for short), this consortium4 was looking to win over hospital construction contracts in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in the early 70s. With the help of Lydia Montaricourt’s girls easing up the negotiations, in 1975, ESH was chosen and given a 900 million euros contract to build two hospitals in Saudi Arabia. The then Prince Albert II of Belgium was said to have weighted heavily in the discussions with Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia5, having visited the country and presented the ESH project to the Saudi prince in 1975. After the contract was given to ESH, the consortium mysteriously goes bust in July 1979 and the whole project gets cancelled. In the following investigation by Belgium’s tax inspection services, it’s established that ESH gave 225 million of euros of commissions to Belgian intermediaries (that includes possibly Prince Albert) to use their powers to promote the project to the Saudi royal family. It smells of massive scam.

The Director of Human Relations for EuroSystem Hospitalier was none other than Fortunato “Tuna” Israel, a madame6. Tuna Israel had of course absolutely no experience as an HR, but her prostitutes were known to be “orgy specialists”. An enigmatic figure, Tuna Israel was even said to be an intelligence asset7. Her prostitution network was hired across Europe to charm businessmen and politicians on behalf of ESH. Lydia Montaricourt, a prostitute working for Tuna, would later receive Tuna’s contacts books and inherit her network when she became a madame herself. It’s easy to see where this is going. Interrogated by the police in 1979 after a house search, Tuna would say that her role for ESH was :

[…] to find girls to keep the Prince [Albert] and his companions company during their travels abroad. These girls were prostitutes.

Fortunato Israel (holding the glass in the first picture, and the mic in the second one) and some of her girls at a party organised at the Jonathan (Père Ubu)

The police found a document at Tuna’s house that indicated she had been in contact with Roger Boas (we’ll talk about him later) and gendarmerie general Fernand Beaurir, the highest rank in the service. It later appeared that girls from Tuna’s network were used as company by Paul Vanden Boyenants (we will also get to him later), Roger Boas, and friends at a safari in Kenya - and not any safari, a little get together organised by none other than Adnan Khashoggi8, who owned the Mount Kenya Safari Club9. The Montaricourt-Tuna Israel case was later hushed up10, everyone denying any involvement, with important evidence like Lydia’s Montaricourt client list and her diary going missing, and any cop daring to look deeper into it was moved away from the case. This network was said to be part of the pink ballets11 and the Brabant Killers case, as part of the Pinon affair12. There’s nothing illegal about hiring prostitutes, but doing so in the context of sensitive negotiations, and possibly falling into blackmail territory is where the line gets blurred. Fortunato Israel never was charged and later fled to Malta, with the help of Roger Boas. In 1990, a former prostitute of Tuna’s Circle, Maud Sarr, would come forward and accuse politicians, magistrates, and policemen of participating in sex parties with girls from the network, including minors… But for now, let’s get back to our case at hand.

Adnan Khashoggi’s Mount Kenya Safari Club (Collectie Wereldmuseum)

Looking deeper into the Malou, Toussaint learns from the Woluwe (Brussels) police that one of their detectives, Mailleux13, is pretty well acquainted with Étienne Delhuvenne, and that the both of them often share a table at restaurants, accompanied by a man named Roland Potier. Delhuvenne is a very influential man according to Mailleux, and he’s the former lawyer and friend of Belgian gangster Patrick Haemers. Haemers is probably the most notorious Belgian criminal. He’s a good looking, bourgeois, tall, blonde man. He looks straight out of an American gangster movie. He’s known as Le grand blond, or the tall blonde man in English. A criminal organisation established itself around him and was commonly referred to as the “Haemers gang”. Haemers and his crew (which included gangsters Philippe Lacroix and Thierry Smars, and his gangster dad Achille Haemers, but not limited to) were specialists of robbing money transports. Usually non violent, the attacks turned deadly on the 4th of November 1985 in the town of Verviers14, where two postmen were killed by Haemers and his gang. The gendarmes escorting the transport were cuffed, but the two employees inside were killed instantly by the explosive charge used by the gang to get to the money. The timing is interesting as 5 days later, the Brabant Killers would strike for a final time, with their deadliest attack yet, in Alost. There’s an argument to be made that there could be an escalation in both operations, as part of the strategy of tension. Some witnesses of Alost, like victim and survivor David Van de Steen, even recognized Patrick Haemers as part of the Brabant gang leading the assault on the Delhaize that evening15. It’s also interesting to note that if you’ve read about the Brabant Killers, you know that the little money they made off the raids on the supermarkets was very limited, almost superfluous, not matching the deadly and military approaches the Brabant gang employed. Haemers and his crew were making far more money robbing money transports than the average Brabant hit. Another indicator, in my opinion, that there could not have been a monetary incentive behind the Brabant Killers operation.

Before going back to the case at hand here, we need to have a deeper look at Patrick Haemers and his activities in the 1980s, in order to fully grasp who is it exactly that we’re talking about, and how it will link back to this case later on.

The aftermath of the attack on the money transport in Verviers, November 5th 1985

The Haemers gang16 kept growing in the following years, with Thierry Smars being pushed aside before he died in a suspicious suicide. They were part of the Brussels criminal milieu, meeting at shady spots like the Jonathan17, where that picture of Tuna Israel was taken. Haemers would gain even more notoriety with his final hit. On a January evening in 1989, former Belgian Prime Minister Paul Vanden Boyenants18 suddenly disappeared. He’s been kidnapped! All that remains in front of his garage is his smoking pipe, his hearing aid and one of his shoes19. A few days later, newspaper offices across Belgium start receiving written letters from an obscure organisation called Brigades Socialistes Révolutionnaires, or Revolutionary Socialist Brigades in English. No one has ever heard of them before, they seem like a parody of the CCC20. Not to mention their name spells BSR in French, as if poking fun of the gendarmerie’s BSR unit, the Brigade Spéciale de Recherche. They want a ransom for Vanden Boyenants or else he’s not making it out alive. It quickly appeared the BSR was nothing but a fake pseudonym used by Haemers and his gang. The cops made Haemers the number one suspect in the case after the ransom was paid and the money was found on one of Haemers’s associates, Basri Bajrami. Outside of the official investigation, there are reasons to believe the whole kidnapping was planned in advance by VDB and that he used Haemers to execute his plans.

The kidnapping happened right as VDB was about to find out if he was going to face justice again for a massive bribery scandal involving him, then Defense Minister, the Belgian army, and Roger Boas’s ASCO21. Boas was an arms trafficker22 who had close ties to the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency23. With Paul Vanden Boyenants, they were the financiers of a gun magazine called AMI, later renamed Fire!24, a favorite of many people gravitating around the Brabant Killers case and the practical shooting scene. Boas was also the lover of Fortunato Israel, the madame I talked about earlier25. In 1979, through VDB, ASCO had gained a contract worth 600 million of today’s euros to provide 1000 armed tanks to the Belgian army. It was established Roger Boas had bribed Paul Vanden Boyenants to acquire the contract. VDB had managed to avoid prosecution, but Boas was condemned in 1992, and went through 15 months of a suspended prison sentence, before being rehabilitated in 1995. He was even a recipient of the Leopold II Order in 2004. VDB avoided a prison sentence but his hearing in front of the House Prosecution Committee, which happened right as he was kidnapped, was suspended because he “could be dead at this moment”. After VDB was released from his captors, just a month later, there was never any follow up to this procedure. The man designated by the Vanden Boyenants family to bring the ransom money to Geneva, Switzerland, was Jean Nathan26, a Kippur War veteran and Mossad asset. Nathan later told journalist Dirk Leestmans that the ransom money for VDB was provided by “Israeli relations” of his, in exchange for “services rendered to the nation of Israel” by VDB, as a politician.

Allow me to get lighter for a second. The day after Vanden Boyenants was freed, he gave a press conference that quickly became infamous in Belgium for just how funnily eerie and weird it is. The tone employed, the way VDB addressed himself in the third person, his recollection of events with weird details… If you can understand French, it’s a must watch :

Here’s a few excerpts :

• I lived in briefs and in a shirt!

• They took my tobacco pipe away.

• WHO kidnapped me ? If only I knew…

• VDB, you’re not going to die here!

• I was a victim of the VDB myth. They wanted VDB’s fortune.

• [Talking to his captors] I’d like to know by which right you’re allowing yourself to be familiar with me.

• [The place I was held at] was further than the north [of France], or if I was in the north, it was pretty far away.

An audio engineer of the press conference, Paul Delnoy, had the bright idea of gathering the sound from it and decided to fuck with it, recording samples over a simple new beat song. It was released under the name Qui..? (Who..?) by Brussels Sound Revolution (playing on the fake name used by Haemers and his gang, Brigades Socialistes Révolutionnaires) and immediately became the number 1 song in Belgium, selling more than 50.000 copies.

After this break and before going back to the case we’re interested in, it’s important to note that Haemers and especially his dad, Achille Haemers, were actually close to the Brussels milieu VDB operated in - the “VDB Connection”, as it was called. Patrick Haemers’s career as a gangster started out as an errand boy for them, delivering dirty cash in Switzerland for the Caisse Privée bank, close to VDB and the Christian Democrats. That’s why it doesn’t really make sense for Haemers to kidnap VDB on his own accord, for monetary reasons, and under the name of a socialist group - he didn’t have any politics, he was a gangster, and one of great use to VDB and his associates, whom he was close to.

After VDB was freed, Haemers became the number one suspect in the kidnapping and immediately went on the run and hid away in Brazil before being snitched on by his dad (Achille) and brother (Éric), who worked as police informants27. During this infiltration, through these informants, the gendarmes learned that behind the gang was “the organisation", a very powerful one, which Patrick Haemers declared to be full of "raging madmen", and that it included in its ranks politicians, lawyers, and doctors. The person who served as a link between this organization and the Haemers gang was Michel Vander Elst, one of Haemers’s lawyers. Curiously enough, Vander Elst was a close friend of another man named Michel, a certain… Michel Nihoul. Nihoul himself was pretty close with the PSC and Vanden Boyenants. Vander Elst would later appear in the Dutroux affair in 1996 as the man who gave a false alibi to cover for Nihoul on the day of the disappearance of Laetitia Delhez… Could these people be part of the “organisation” Haemers was referring to?

The infiltration of the Haemers family’s inner circles led to a 85-page report named “VDBJ”28, made by the two gendarmes working the case. In it, they report about Vanden Boyenants being part of this “organisation”, and that the kidnapping was staged, with their help and Haemers. Quotes from the report :

Patrick allegedly told Achille that he worked for an "organization" and that his services were well paid. The "organisation" took care of renting apartments, and they [the Haemers gang] didn't have to worry about anything. This organization would be composed of prominent people and would have a doctor and a lawyer. They had dangerous political ideas, and Patrick described them as "dangerous lunatics". Patrick himself didn't get involved in politics, "only money matters”. […] According to the informant, VDB also has ties to the organization, and his kidnapping could have been staged. In any case, VDB maintains good relations with his captors.

[…] X18 [Eric Haemers] confirms the existence of the organisation for which Patrick Haemers allegedly works for and tells us about a doctor who allegedly plays a major role in the organisation. Eric Haemers is said to know a lot more about the organization, but he is afraid to speak out.

[…] For eight years, Achille Haemers was an active member of the [Freemason] lodge. After the robbery in Deerlijk, he was put into "sleep" and had to surrender his glove and deposit. At that time, Eric Haemers also became a member of the lodge.

VDB’s lawyers, Jean Paul Dumont and Martial Lancaster (who would also both serve as Michel Nihoul and Madani Bouhouche’s lawyers29) were alleged to have been in contact with Achille Haemers, to tell him about how it was imperative that his son does not have a direct confrontation with VDB, and that he should not be extradited back to Belgium after he was arrested in Brazil. Was Haemers being entrapped by the organisation and VDB after he had served his role? Was he being made a patsy? One of the two gendarmes working the Haemers family informants later told journalist Douglas De Coninck30 that he was under the impression that, for the good of certain Belgian political and judicial circles, Haemers should not have been extradited.

Patrick Haemers and his wife Denise Tyack upon their arrest in Brazil

Finally, inside the VDBJ report, we find out that Thierry Smars of the Haemers gang had been contacted by a man who presented himself as a French secret service agent, Roland Bastiani, but who was in fact, Elio Ciolini31. He was supposedly the man who received the money made from the robberies by the gang. Ciolini is a well known character of the Years of Lead in Italy, instigating fake leads after Bologna’s train station attack in 1980. He’s also linked to the P2 lodge32, as well as various intelligence agencies. What interest did he have in the Haemers gang? It’s suspicious that in the context of the Belgian 80s and the Brabant Killers, a man like Ciolini appears. Could it be that the Brabant Killers weren’t the only gang used for purposes beyond robberies? If you consider the CCC, the Haemers gang, and the Brabant Killers as different versions (with different goals, perhaps) of the same method - the strategy of tension, we might have a better understanding of the 1980s in Belgium as les années de plombs, the Years of Lead.

Haemers was finally extradited from Brazil to Belgium in 1990. He was considered a suspect in the Brabant Killers, and made declarations about revealing “all that he knew”. That is before he died in his cell, on May 14th 1993, at the dawn of his trial. He hanged himself. Jean-Paul Dumont, his lawyer, will say that his suicide could have been "provoked" : Haemers was on Rohypnol, and if his treatment was abruptly interrupted, he would have had a lot of difficulty dealing with the withdrawing, and it could have led to his suicide.

All of this now leads us back to where we were, with gendarme Marc Toussaint and his investigation. Patrick Haemers’s widow, Denise Tyack, a former French prostitute, was now dating Roland Potier, a petty criminal. Mailleux tells Toussaint about the parties held at the Malou, that in 1994 a fetish party was supposed to be held for New Year's Eve but it was canceled last minute by local authorities, and so it had to be moved somewhere else. But other parties followed, and the vibe was always mysterious, à la Eyes Wide Shut, with every attendee wearing a mask or a hood, with leather clothing, and all of them were bourgeois or from noble families, judging from the cars parked out front.

We’re now in June 1995. Toussaint has been interviewing some of the girls hired by Farid who was running the Malou with Delhuvenne. Despite it only really making money during the summer, the place was always hiring new girls : it was a cover for the pimping activities of Farid, who was always seen driving expensive cars and spending absurd amounts of money. He provided the women, and Delhuvenne provided the clients, old wealthy men with a taste for BDSM. Besides Bernadette and Sonia, another girl, Isabelle, stepped up and accused Farid of being a pimp. She said he had tried to make her boyfriend get into his scheme and make money off her, and that even if she filed a complaint against him, he was backed by the local police and “untouchable”. Farid was a close friend of the Forest (Brussels) police commissioner. He also used fake names and adresses to cover his tracks. Isabelle had learned of Farid through his former girlfriend, Nathalie. Both girls spoke of sex parties at the Malou. Nathalie talks about a BDSM event where she gave out drinks as a waitress :

All these people were dressed in leather and latex. […] I saw strange things during that evening. I saw women flirting with several different men. I saw women tied to columns and men walking past to hit them, kiss them.

She does mention the NYE party of 1994, which was finally held in a warehouse in Schaerbeek (Brussels). There are many other parties she mentions, like this shiny science fiction “Star-Trek” themed party… These are all organised by Farid and another man named Guy, they’re all focused on BDSM, they have the same wealthy and 30 to 50 years old attendees, and they wear masks that they never remove.

So far, it looks like Toussaint has stumbled upon the private sex parties of the local bourgeoisie. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these, nothing illegal, but things definitely get weird when a pimp is involved with bringing in young fresh women. The place where these are held, the Malou, is also a curious choice. But this is only the beginning. The next part of this story gets a bit tangled, so pay attention.

Toussaint meets a former girl of Farid on the tip of a colleague. Also named Nathalie, Nathalie V. was friends with three girls who worked at a bar in Affligem (Brussels). Bea, Soria, and Deborah were all waitresses at the Bubbles Bar, ran by… Farid. Nathalie V. starts working there. The clients of this special bar were “stimulated” with massages by the waitresses while they have their drinks. Farid tells Nathalie V. that he’s looking for women to work in a new facility, that he’s already got 3 others on board. It’s run by a woman named Chantal, her friend Soria has worked for her before. Who’s that woman, Chantal? Chantal Roefs is a madame, who had been to prison for pimping. She’s close to the Fortunato-Montaricourt network. She also owns her own tanning salon operation and runs an escort-girls network. Soria, interrogated by Toussaint, says that Chantal works closely with Farid, who has girls working for both of them in Germany, and they also both drug their own prostitutes to force them to work. He also would provide her regularly with new girls, for a fee.

Chantal Roefs was the owner of and worked at the Body Sun tanning salon in Brussels, at number 144 in Vleurgat Street. Right next door, at number 142, is the Isis, an establishment also known as the Institut Bizaar, a brothel that she operated as well. Nathalie V. and Soria were asked by Farid if they liked BDSM, and if so, he knew a place where they could work, with Chantal, meaning the Institut Bizaar. Chantal has had troubles because she went to prison for pimping and had a police investigation file opened. The Institut Bizaar had to shut down because she couldn’t run it, meaning that it was officially closed, but behind doors, prostitutes were still provided to the clients. It worked with a catalog system, where the client is provided a girl based on what he chose in the catalog, like a blonde, or a brunette. Soria had previously worked as a brunette for Chantal. Chantal also took pride in the fact that she had provided women for important people like celebrity lawyers or a famous Swedish football player, who played for the Brussels club Anderlecht33.

To sum it up, the Malou was used as a cover for pimping operations and as a place to hold BDSM sex parties. Farid Riffi recruited women to work there and then brought them into prostitution. He used these girls for his own network or for Chantal Roefs's brothel, for a fee. Drugs can be used if necessary, to force the girls to work. The clientele is always wealthy, Brussels’s elite, and sadomasochism is their specialty, Delhuvenne being able to help find this specific clientele. But Soria has one big reveal to make to Toussaint : there’s pedophilia involved with Chantal and Farid’s prostitution rings. She tells the story of how on February 12th 1995, at the Institut Bizaar, she saw a young girl come in, brought by Chantal, for a specific client. He wanted a virgin. Chantal said that she was 18, but in reality, she’s only 14. This young girl, named Cindy, had just ran away from her Italian family in Mons, near Charleroi. She met up with a friend of hers, Isabelle (a different one than the one previously mentioned), who’s 17 and dating a 32 years old drug dealer and former pimp named Carlo, and they decide to all go out at a club in Brussels. At the club, Cindy’s friends talk with a few men, including one named Faysal. He’s Farid errand boy. They have a great time, Cindy drinks alcohol for the first time, they go home. Then next morning, Cindy’s friend tells her that she can make a lot of money if she accepts to have sex with an old man. She’s afraid and only accepts because she thinks Isabelle’s boyfriend might beat them up. After she’s brought to the Bizaar by Isabelle and Carlo, Cindy is brought to a private room by Chantal, where she’s raped by a man in his 50s. That’s when Soria finds her, crying in the hallways of the brothel, and notices immediately that she is obviously a minor. A complaint was never filed, and Cindy simply left the Bizaar completely broken and in tears, not even getting the money she was promised for what she was forced to do. Here’s part of Soria’s testimony about Cindy :

[…] Around mid-February, I was working at the Institut Bizaar with my friend Mee-Ai. There, we met a young girl I had never seen before. Her name was Cindy. Chantal brought her to Barbara. Chantal told Barbara that she had a client for Cindy. […] She said she was a virgin and that was what the client was looking for. Barbara said she looked young, but Chantal said she had just turned eighteen. […] Chantal replied that he was paying 120,000 francs and that she was giving Cindy 20,000 francs (respectively 3000 and 500 of today’s euros). […] I know that the client “consumed” her right there. I also saw the client, he was a big, ugly old man. The girl left crying. […] I was moved to see her leave in that state. She kept crying. I tried to comfort her, but she kept sobbing. A week later, I talked to Barbara about it, and she told me that Chantal was crazy, that the girl from last week wasn't eighteen […] but was actually fourteen. […] I was disgusted.

At the end of August 1995, Toussaint and his team find Cindy and bring her in for questioning. She accepts, telling Toussaint that everything Soria told them was true. Her friends are also interrogated, and it’s established that they knew Faysal, Farid’s sidekick. Toussaint establishes a list of the people involved with the Bizaar : there’s Barbara and Raphaelle, two prostitutes who are the “new owners” of the Bizaar after it was forced to close down, they’re subletting it and running it for Chantal Roefs because she legally can’t anymore. They say that Chantal is now back to being a prostitute herself, broke, operating in the Bizaar and a nearby bar called L’Excellence where Farid is often seen hanging out. Her boyfriend is a man named Alain Rekk, director of a garage called Radar, a mysterious company that pops up in the Dutroux-Nihoul affair34. He’s close with Roland Potier, the small time criminal dating Patrick Haemer’s widow, Denise Tyack. Cindy’s friend, Isabelle, says that Chantal was the one who gave her the money when she brought the girl to the Bizaar. She also mentions that her boyfriend Carlo, the pimp, wanted to force her to do it, having asked her to do it before, but then decided that bringing in Cindy instead would solve their problem. Isabelle also identifies the 50 years old man she saw get in and who she’s certain has raped Cindy : it’s Étienne Delhuvenne, judging from pictures she’s shown from Toussaint’s file on the Malou.

Based upon the information given to him by Cindy and Isabelle, Toussaint proceeds with the arrestation of Étienne Delhuvenne. Living with his old mother, Delhuvenne reads the arrest warrant outloud to her :

Look at this mom, it’s [Judge] Damien who signed the warrant. And we went out to eat with him, again, that one day…

This mysterious sentence is clearly a hint for the gendarmes proceeding with the arrest that Delhuvenne is very familiar with the judge who ordered his arrest. Such a statement could often be used to dismiss a judge on grounds of legitimate suspicion, but nothing of that sort happens, evidently... At the gendarmerie station, a colleague of Toussaint seems awfully familiar with Delhuvenne too, almost joking with him while everyone else is silent :

And so, Mr. Delhuvenne, having troubles with Bernadette Lepièce ?

He’s obviously referring to the woman who was denouncing Farid and Delhuvenne, though she has nothing to do with the specific case Delhuvenne was brought in for… Very curious indeed. Chantal Roefs denies knowing Delhuvenne but Cindy recognizes him as her rapist and Isabelle is certain to have seen Chantal bring the girl to her room. She also says that Delhuvenne is the man who paid Chantal and went to Cindy’s room. Soria recognizes him as well. After this identification session, Delhuvenne takes one last look at Toussaint and says :

I don't know what's going on, but believe me, Mr. Toussaint, as soon as I leave the judge's office, I'll find you again.

A clear warning. It seems that Mr. Delhuvenne has a lot of friends in the police and among judges.

So, the Institut Bizaar is implicated in pedophilia through at least one case, with this 14 years old girl, Cindy. Étienne Delhuvenne paid 120,000 Belgian francs (3,000 euros) to rape her, he wanted a virgin. Since the brothel was working through a catalog, we can suppose that minors might be part of their catalog, and so this is not an isolated case35. Chantal Roefs, friend of Delhuvenne and owner of the Bizaar, handled the money and promised him a virgin, bringing in a minor through her network. Carlo, who knows Faysal, who is none other than Farid's errand boy, first suggested that his girlfriend Isabelle should be used by Delhuvenne, but she refuses, resulting in Cindy being forced instead. Cindy is taken to Brussels and the Institut Bizaar by her friends, and is then raped and abused by Delhuvenne, Patrick Haemers' former lawyer, who is associated with Farid in a prostitution and BDSM sex party network for the elite of Brussels and Belgium. It is clear now that we are dealing with an organized child abuse network, on top of a prostitution network.

At the end of August 1995, Toussaint is surprisingly sidelined and removed from the case, his superior assigning him to administrative tasks. Did he do something wrong? Was it because he looked too deep into this and strings were pulled to sabotage him? The gendarme taking over the case is a "pedophile case specialist" : it couldn’t be further from the truth, the gendarme is simply following orders and showing absolutely no signs of critical thinking. Toussaint continues to consult the Institut Bizaar file in secret, thanks to his colleagues sharing it with him, and he becomes aware of serious dysfunctions that simply cannot be errors, according to him.

The last important inquiry requested by the investigating judge Vandermeesch working the case was to identify incoming and outgoing telephone calls to the numbers of the Bizaar, the Body Sun, and Chantal Roefs’ phones. The slang casually used for this act by the Belgian gendarmerie at that time period was “to establish a zoller”. Quickly, Toussaint noticed something weird : in his request, the investigating judge specifies incoming and outgoing calls coming ONLY from “Zone 02” (Brussels). Cindy comes from Mons, Carlo lives in Morlanwelz, Delhuvenne has a second home in the Namur region, etc. Obviously, you have to look everywhere if you're trying to establish links between the perpetrators and the victim, since many of the people in the case live outside the Brussels area. There was an "order" made followed by a "delivery" in the case of the rape of a young girl in a prostitution ring. There’s a chain of events and people. There are therefore people involved outside Brussels.

Another disturbing detail is the length of time it took to analyze the information contained in this zoller : the inquiry was requested on September 21, 1995, and on October 9, three weeks later, Belgacom36 provided the telephone information. These results were given to the head of the investigation at the Uccle gendarmerie brigade. There were 65 pages to analyze, and these analyses would take until… May 17, 1996. That’s 8 months later. What would the conclusion of the report be after the investigation into the zoller by the gendarmerie?

We are working on identifying the telephone numbers. We have found no usable clues.

Toussaint is infuriated. 8 months to read a 65 pages report and no one has taken the time. If they had, they would have noticed that more than 800 (!) telephone numbers were clearly identified, with some belonging to official Belgian institutions, like

• The Ministry of National Defense

• The Ministry of the Interior

• The Ministry of Finance

• The Ministry of the Brussels-Capital Region

• The Ministry of the Flemish Community

• The Municipal Administration of Molenbeek (Brussels)

• The European Affairs Commission

• The Embassy of the United States

• The Embassy of Morocco

• The Embassy of San Marino

• The Brussels Gendarmerie

• The Brussels Judiciary Police

• Several doctors, lawyers, a journalist

• RTBF (Belgian public broadcast television)

• SNCB (Belgian national railway company)

This alone is enough to make you stop and wonder what could possibly have been the communications made between some of these and a brothel ran by Chantal Roefs. But it gets weirder. Some very worrying child services were also in contact with the Bizaar :

• The Association of Parents for the Development of Autistic People (APEPA)

• The Office of Birth and Childhood (ONE)

• The Federation of Catholic Scouts (FSC)

• Administration of Physical Education, Sport and Outdoor Life, under the Ministry of Culture and Social Affairs (ADEPS)

• Brussels Municipal Council Youth and Family

• IRSA (Royal Institute for the Deaf and Blind) – IMP Prince of Orange

These are mostly organizations that help children and young people, sometimes psychologically or physically weak – it's shocking to see them on a list of incoming and outgoing calls to and from a brothel specializing in BDSM where a child was raped. These organizations may not be connected, it might only be their employees who called or were called, but it's still extremely disturbing and should certainly not lead to establishing that there’s "no usable clues”. And these are all only coming from a small, defined Brussels area… Delhuvenne's statement about the judge and to Toussaint upon his arrest, Toussaint’s removal from the case, the restriction of the phone numbers investigation to the Brussels area, the lack of investigations into the organizations found in the zoller, the 8 months of analysis to reach the conclusion "no usable evidence”… It seemed clear to Toussaint that something was off. The Dutroux affair hadn’t happened yet, we’re still in 1995, but the gendarmerie was already moving in the shadows with the Othello operation in Charleroi. We know that the gendarmerie wanted to be solo on the Dutroux case, saying they wanted to bring down a larger network. Is that why they weren’t communicating anything with the Institut Bizaar ? Toussaint was also reminded of a similar case to this one, the CRIES scandal. It is pretty unknown outside of Belgium and it’s absolutely massive, in every way. Let’s take the time to establish the facts. The acts described in the next three paragraphs are particularly graphic and disgusting, even when just sticking to the facts, and if you wish to, you could skip them entirely without it impacting your reading of this piece at all.

CRIES stands for Center for Research and Information on Childhood and Sexuality (in English) and was founded in 1987, in Belgium. Its founder, Philippe Carpentier, intended to help pedophiles fight their pedophilia. Carpentier had formerly worked as a translator at a police station. But as it turned out, CRIES was in fact an international CSAM distribution network and child prostitution organization37. The CRIES edited a pedophile magazine called L’Espoir (Hope) and it is what led the police towards it. They staked out the entry door of the CRIES and noticed that a condemned pedophile registered in their files was seen entering the premises. After an investigation, 16 different searches were organized in and around the CRIES. 15 people were arrested and a listing of more than 400 clients of the CRIES was acquired. It was filled with adresses of pedophiles and pro-pedophile organisations all around the world. More than 20.000 pictures of children as young as a few months old were seized. Only 20 children were identified in the pictures.

One member of the CRIES, Michel Felu, worked at UNICEF in Brussels, as a sort of “handyman”. He sometimes spent his nights down in the basement of the international organisation. It’s like he lived there. The police searched it and found out that the basement had been used for CSAM38 photo shoots. There was a whole photo development laboratory, a catalogue made from CSAM pictures, as well as a computer full of adresses of children to be sent to pedophiles. Felu was supposedly bringing in children and gaining the trust of their parents by pretending to be giving out computer science lessons in his basement. Others were arrested, like an employee of the Minister of Justice, or a couple who “rented” their handicapped child to members of the CRIES. Another person arrested was Olivier Ralet, a school teacher who had written about arms trafficking as well as Wackenhut and the far right in Belgium39. Ralet photographed minors for the CRIES. In total, 14 people were sentenced to prison, with sentences ranging from 3 to 10 years.

The CRIES network was like an octopus, making its way to the Netherlands, Italy, France, the USA, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and more. 280 members were identified by the Belgian police in foreign countries. But all they could do was share the information with the foreign police services, and so most got away with it.

In January of 1996, Toussaint learns of new developments with Cindy and her family.

We learned that the mother and her daughter [Cindy] no longer reside at home. They are staying at the maternal home in Cuesmes. Cindy's father could no longer bear the tension surrounding his daughter, the threats weighing on her and her family. The parents therefore decided to break up following this very unstable climate.

No follow up was given to this police report besides the fact that tension and threats are mentioned. From whom and why? The gendarmerie doesn’t care to know. At the same time period, Soria and Isabelle stop their collaboration with the gendarmes for the same reason : they’re being threatened. What’s even worse is that later on, in March 1999, in the Étienne Delhuvenne trial for the rape of Cindy, Isabelle will completely disavow her statement about him. She is made to write a 5 pages letter in Delhuvenne’s own lawyer’s office, in his home, and the draft is even found there, in the bin. Bit of an unusual, highly personal and stressful environment to make someone write a letter in. In this letter, she says that the investigators “forced her to testify”, that she was ordered to “sign a statement previously written by the gendarmes and Toussaint”, that she was forced to “recognize Delhuvenne” because a gendarme told her to “look carefully at this picture, because it is him that you will have to recognize, wearing the number 6", and that this whole case was a setup, that she would have been beaten if she had not cooperated with the gendarmes. Upon reading her letter at the trial, here’s what the judge had to say to Isabelle :

Do you realize the seriousness of your remarks? […] You wrote this letter without even speaking to your lawyer. There’s only two possible explanations. Either, as you say, the police forced you. Or it was someone else. Are you afraid of someone?

Isabelle stands by her letter. Chantal Roefs agrees with Isabelle on what she said, it was a setup by Carlo (out of all people) and Bernadette Lepièce, Delhuvenne's former girlfriend. The tribunal’s presiding judge also had something to say about the letter, to Delhuvenne :

Don't you think it's a strange for a lawyer to have a letter of withdrawal written at his own home?

Delhuvenne says he had it written while he was still in jail but he’s lying in a very obvious way, the dates don’t correspond at all.

Cindy doesn’t even show up at the trial. The prosecution's representative considers that the charges are not strong enough to charge Delhuvenne with rape of a minor without Isabelle's testimony, and so, he’s acquitted. But Chantal Roefs and Delhuvenne still remained charged for their involvement in pimping, Delhuvenne receiving a three-year suspended prison sentence40 for it. He appealed, his sentence increasing to three years in prison in 2000. He did not appear at his appeal trial, he opposed it, and dragged out the proceedings until the statute of limitations expired and his sentence was therefore overturned. He was a free man.

I think it’s fair to say the investigation was sabotaged. Same for the trial. Étienne Delhuvenne was prosecuted again in 2003 (forgery in connection with trafficking in CSAM video tapes) and in 2007 (malfeasance in connection with the management of retirement homes) but he remained free, and was never even bothered. We will get back to those CSAM VHS tapes shortly…

We understand now that the Institut Bizaar was a brothel working as a coverup for a prostitution network involved in pedophilia. We have established that it reached to people like Étienne Delhuvenne, a man close to the Haemers gang and the VDB Connection. We know that Patrick Haemers and his dad, Achille Haemers were definitely involved in criminal activities throughout the 80s. But it won’t be until 1996 and the beginning of the Dutroux affair that we’ll hear about Achille Haemers’s involvement with prostitution and… child trafficking.

Part two here

[2025-04-26] Blue Rose Reports — Ever since I’ve started researching the Dutroux affair, one constant has stayed with me throughout my readings and my own writing. This case is a symptom of a larger sickness that’s plagueing Belgium – political and financial corruption, sexual blackmail, massive criminal networks, prostitution, pedophilia, and CSAM1 rings – all happening right here, in NATO’s heart, and Europe’s capital. The Belgian state has effectively adopted the cover-up of the Dutroux & Nihoul network as the objective truth, the one true reality of the Dutroux affair – there was no network of any kind, he was kidnapping and killing these girls all alone (except for the help of his wife or an accomplice), for his own pleasure. He’s the Monster of Belgium. The boogie man from Charleroi. Now anyone who’s ever spent more than 5 minutes looking up Dutroux understands that you have to be completely oblivious to not at least notice there was a bigger operation of human trafficking and child trafficking happening around Marc Dutroux and Michel Nihoul, but also other people they were affiliated with. And this is what has been obsessing me and staying with me all along : The truth is that there’s multiple aspects to this case. There’s not just one answer that solves it all. There’s what we know of it, there’s what we suppose, and there’s what we don’t know.

What we know of Marc Dutroux and the various criminal networks he was involved with throughout his life makes up most of the mainstream talk around the Dutroux case. It’s what’d you hear if you turned on any true crime podcast or googled “Dutroux” and read the Wikipedia page of the case. What we suppose makes for the theories surrounding him and the people around him, like Michel Nihoul. For example, you’ve got the creation and distribution of CSAM, their links to prostitution and pedophile abuse networks, as well as the various trafficking operations Marc Dutroux was involved with, like vehicle trafficking, as well as the fact that he most likely was a police informant, like Michel Nihoul2. This is all documented, but we can’t know exactly to which extent Dutroux and others were involved. And then, there’s what we don’t know. And I’m not only talking about the questions that are left unanswered, like most of them are if you know anything this case, but I’m referring to the shadows of the Dutroux affair. Not even the smaller details, but rather something else completely, the unknown, the missing pieces. This is what I’m after.

When arrested in August of 1996, Dutroux slowly and carefully revealed to the police forces what he knew of those kidnapping cases he was being questioned on. At this point, the investigators were still only looking for Laetitia Delhez officially, and they were trying to make him admit to other kidnappings. He eventually tried to make himself the man in charge when he said to the cops working him “I’m gonna give you two girls”, referring to Sabine Daerdenne and Laetitia Delhez. Dutroux played that game for a few days, giving hints, and every time he would point them towards another dead girl, it would be only indications, barely admitting to being responsible for their disappearance, let alone their death. This is typical behavior from Marc Dutroux, as he’s a known narcissist, a diagnosed sociopath, and he has a major victim complex. He’s always insinuating that he somehow had his hands tied and couldn’t do anything to stop what happened, and that all those deaths simply were the result of society and how he had been treated. He was made this way by Belgium and its justice system, they had slowly shaped him to become this monster. Here’s what the man had to say about himself when asked “Why did you do this ?” :

I wanted to create my own little world. This idea came to me after I got out of prison. I could no longer live in society as it is. It's other people's fault that I became like this. I had the choice between owning a girl or committing suicide (...). I confessed and I showed you their hiding place because I didn't want the girls to suffer.3

Dutroux’s mugshot on the day of his arrest, August 13th 1996

The truth is that Dutroux is a result of his environment, but despite his rough upbringing, Dutroux made his own name as a monster for himself, and that when confronted with what he did, he would either flat out deny or act as victim even when he’s the direct perpetrator. This is of course a reaction you’d expect from a narcissist sociopath. But this split between his actions and his detachment from seeing himself as the one responsible for them could also be explained by the fact Dutroux was working for someone else - he was just handling these girls, the real people responsible for it ? They’re his bosses, whoever he was working for, whoever he was delivering them to. This is a sentiment echoed by Dutroux to his victims when he would paint himself as the “good guy”, saying the people in charge were the “bad guys”, and that he was doing these girls a favor by keeping them with him, in his dungeon, and not giving them out to the bad guys who would surely kill them. And so he would only bring up girls to the cops after they were mentioned to him, and eventually, out of pride, he’ll say he knows what happened to them, vaguely. But how can you trust Marc Dutroux to come forward and reveal all the crimes that he has committed ? That’s the main question that led me to writing this, and it also made me want to go deeper on that thought and see if anything could be dug up. And beyond what could be linking Dutroux to the crimes I found while doing research, bringing up cold cases would also help paint a larger picture of what was happening in Belgium throughout the 80s and the 90s.

In 1989, after kidnapping and raping multiple young girls, Dutroux was arrested and a trial was held for the five girls who came forward, but only those. It is documented from victims’s testimonies that Dutroux was involved with the abuse of at least nine girls during the 80s time period4. As for the total of victims for the time period between Dutroux’s release from prison in 1992 until his arrest in 1996, the only account we have for that is the very flawed initial police investigation and Dutroux’s word for it – 6 girls, who all went missing after being kidnapped by Dutroux and/or his accomplices, 4 of them (Julie, Mélissa, An, Eefje) that then later were found dead on his and Bernard Weinstein’s properties, with the other two girls (Sabine and Laetitia) being found alive and saved. But let’s not forget the 3 Slovakian girls that Dutroux abused in 1995 as well : Henrietta, Eva and Yancka. He used a camcorder to record their abuse and was convicted of it in his trial5.

The reality is that missing children cases were reaching records numbers in Belgium in the early 90s6, and it’s not only until the disapperances of Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo in 1995 that these cases started gaining media attention. Before there was any Dutroux affair, there was a missing children panic happening. Who was kidnapping these children ? Were all of them found ? Could any of them have also been kidnapped by Marc Dutroux ? What about one of his accomplices ? Were there any other notorious pedophiles operating at the same time in Belgium or in nearby countries ? That is what I’m going to look into, and in doing so, I will try to find answers, at least a lead that can explain what was happening exactly.

A collage made from various pictures of dead and missing children in Belgium, 2004

There’s a lot of things I’d like to develop in what I’m calling the “missing pieces” of the Dutroux case but for this first entry, I want to focus mostly on the late 80s and the early 90s in Belgium and the rise in missing children cases. Some of these cases were even attributed to Marc Dutroux before he was dimissed because they found out who did it or because there wasn’t enough evidence. In 2002, as Michel Bourlet, the prosecutor in charge of the Dutroux affair, was gearing up for the trial, he added 11 additional counts to Dutroux and his gang’s charges : 11 attempted kidnappings, people that came forward after 1996 and accused Dutroux7. They were later all dismissed because of the lack of evidence, but it goes to show that this “panic” as some described it, wasn’t simply a panic, many missing children cases went cold or were never fully explained, and some of these kids were lucky enough to escape their kidnappers before being taken away. And so after Dutroux happened, a large numbers of people decided to come forward and try to get justice. It’s entirely possible they weren’t kidnapped by Dutroux, and you’re bound to have fake stories popping up from time to time, but it also goes to show that maybe Dutroux was only a cog in a larger system, that Belgium had been underlooking it’s missing children cases, and that something had to be done to bring light to these cases and change the way they were treated by the cops, so easily dismissed. The main story I want to talk about today gets exactly at that.

In November of 1995, a young girl named Caroline from Obaix, near Charleroi, is kidnapped by a man in a vehicle, and then left for dead with her throat cut after being abused. She ended up surviving. The first police man on the crime scene, a man named Dethuin, is immediately remembered of a case he was dealing with in 19858. He goes on to say in his report :

This is how Dutroux works.

He was immediately considered a possible suspect. This is indeed the Dutroux Modus Operandi : for most of his kidnappings in the 80s, he would pick up girls with his van, drug them, either abuse them directly or bring them back to his house, and then drop them off. This is what led to his first arrest in 1986. But the investigation starts to diverge from Dutroux after being passed around and then falling in the lap of “super cop” Georges Zicot of the judiciary police. For those who aren’t familiar, Zicot was THE cop working on car trafficking in Charleroi, and he had multiple informants who were part of the Courcelles Gang9 formed around Dutroux, including Gérard Pinon, the man who was hosting Dutroux’s accomplice, Bernard Weinstein. Gérard Pinon was a crooked car dealer who owned more than 20 garages, hangars, properties all over Charleroi10. Dutroux himself could very well have been an informant for Zicot, who was accused of working with him and protecting him, and was even arrested for 35 days before Belgian justice cleaned up the mess. More about that later. The “protecting Dutroux” accusation came in part from of his unwillingness to investigate any clue that would lead to Dutroux in Caroline’s case.

Furthermore, here in the timeline of the Dutroux affair, we’re at the end of November 1995. Julie and Mélissa would have been alive and kept in Dutroux’s dungeon in Marcinelle. René Michaux, the gendarme who was in charge of Operation Othello (a surveillance operation led in secret and solely by the gendarmerie of Charleroi who were trying to catch Dutroux “in the act”) had been looking for a way to get into Dutroux’s house for weeks now. Later on, when he was interrogated by Belgium’s Permanent Control Committee of the Police Forces (“Comité P” for short, basically the police’s police) about that time period, here’s what Michaux had to say :

If I had known that Dutroux was a potential suspect in the events in Obaix (Caroline’s kidnapping and attempted murder), there would have been grounds to look for evidence in the suspect’s home, for sleeping pills, a knife, or more, and so to draw up a police report and request search warrants.11

Gendarme René Michaux explaining himself in front of the Dutroux parliamentary investigation in 1997

The Comité P was shocked to hear that coming from Michaux’s mouth. Michaux was doing everything he could to find a way to request a search warrant, and yet, didn’t get in contact with Charleroi’s judiciary police when Dutroux’s name immediately came up in Caroline’s investigation. And the judiciary police of course didn’t get in touch with him, because the gendarmerie was riding solo and in total secret on Operation Othello. You’d think this guy was doing it on purpose at this point. Asking the country’s other police services about the man you’re putting under surveillance and looking for any way to get inside his house seems logical and very simple. And yet…

As a reminder, René Michaux would be the man who’d go on to lead multiple house searches on Dutroux’s properties, including the sadly infamous December 13th 1995 search, where Michaux hears voices in front of Julie and Mélissa’s cage hidden behind the wall in Dutroux’s basement, saying “shut up” to his colleagues out loud, making the girls stop talking, only to then dismiss the voices as coming “from kids playing outside” (on a freezing morning when most children are at school…). Not to mention they know they’re looking for young girls and an hidden cage of sorts according to informant tips, and yet, Michaux doesn’t even knock on the walls trying to locate it, nor does he tries to call for someone or bring a camera with him. To top it all, this house search was led by a search warrant that was “flipped” from the judiciary police’s arrest of Marc Dutroux on December 6th (the “truck theft” story12), Michaux having forced the investigating judge to give it to the gendarmerie instead of the judiciary police, because they were in charge of Othello13. Same thing he could have done a month earlier when Caroline’s kidnapping happened, if Zicot requested a search warrant based on Dutroux being a suspect.

When Michel Bourlet, who’s as I stated previously the prosecutor in charge of the Dutroux affair, learned about the Obaix fiasco, here’s what he had to say to Belgium’s attorney general Eliane Likendaele in October of 1996 :

Beyond the elements included in the 6th of September 1996 report by my colleague from Charleroi, Mr. Marchandise, I can inform you that my astonishment regarding the handling of this case was also based on the fact that a DNA analysis had been carried out on two suspects [of Caroline’s kidnapping] who were later released, and not on Dutroux. However, […] Mr. Dutroux stated that he had agreed to have hair samples taken from him for such an analysis. It should be noted that, during the investigation entrusted to the "P" Committee by my colleague from Charleroi […], the investigators from the "P" Committee found his hair sample in the office of the Judiciary Police officer in charge of the investigation. I therefore deduce that this sample was never submitted to the expert appointed by the investigating judge. Then, recently, the Neufchâteau investigators in charge of the Dutroux case got their hands on a Ford Fiesta vehicle in which, according to my colleague from Charleroi, hairs belonging to the victim of the attack on 22 November 1995 in Obaix were found. Finally, I would add that the statements of Mrs Martin [Dutroux’s wife] recently received by the Arlon Judiciary Police show that on the day of the assault, Dutroux was in Obaix. I therefore share the opinion of my colleague from Charleroi and I am surprised by the manner in which this case was handled, both by the police and the courts, ultimately resulting in a dismissal, when clearly not all the necessary duties had been carried out.14

Let’s stop here for a second before continuing on with Bourlet. Here, he lays down important points beyond the simple “police service wars” fuckup that Michaux seemed to be invoking :

• At this point, Dutroux’s DNA had never been analyzed in regards to Caroline’s case. His hair sample was found in the office of the cop leading the investigation, just waiting to be used for the past year. Who’s the cop leading the investigation ? Georges Zicot, the handler of the Courcelles gang. Is he trying to protect Dutroux or someone else ?

• A Ford Fiesta was used to kidnap Caroline, and inside, hairs belonging to her were found. Bourlet points this out because one of the cars used by members of the Courcelles gang (Michel Lelièvre, Bernard Weinstein, Pierre Rochow, either or all depending on who you ask) was a Ford Fiesta, and many witnesses linked that same Ford Fiesta to Julie and Mélissa’s kidnapping15, possibly being the vehicle that was used for it.

• And then finally, Dutroux’s wife places him in Obaix the day of the assault against Caroline. Dutroux was pretty familiar with Obaix and for a good reason : that’s where he grew up. His parents moved there to raise him after coming back from then Belgian Congo, today’s Burundi. Obaix is also the place where Dutroux commits his first kidnapping in 1985, with his then accomplice Jean Van Peteghem16.

Michel Bourlet goes on :

[…] I can now state that the combination within the same public prosecutor's office of the Othello report, the "kidnapping” file [truck theft story] and the Obaix assault file was bound to lead to an investigation against Dutroux, with a search of his home in Marcinelle. This seems to me all the more dramatic since, in the week preceding Weinstein's death, according to Dutroux's own statements […], Weinstein was held captive in the hidden cage located in Dutroux's basement, with Julie and Mélissa locked in a room upstairs. If the search had taken place between November 22, 1995, the date of the Obaix assault, and November 25, 1995, the approximate date of Weinstein's death, it would inevitably have led investigators to discover the presence of Julie and Mélissa alive upstairs. The shortcomings of the investigation are so serious that I inevitably come to wonder whether they can be explained solely by negligence or whether Dutroux benefited from protection, both from the police and the courts.

Mr. Bourlet doesn’t mince his words here and gets right to the point : they had everything they needed to search Dutroux’s house in November 1995 and save Julie and Mélissa, whether or not he was responsible for the assault against Caroline. Instead, the fuckup is so enormous that Bourlet legit wonders if Dutroux isn’t being protected by magistrates and the police services, hinting at Zicot. Bourlet had been the one who presented Zicot as “Dutroux’s protector” right when the investigation started17. Bourlet expands on that :

Concerning police protection, investigations are underway […]. These investigations are being entrusted to Committee "P", with regards to Mr. Michaux of the gendarmerie and […] Mr. Zicot of the Charleroi judiciary police. As for court protections, I have no information to give you, and I do not have the authority to investigate magistrates, but I do wonder if some of them might be in possession of certain cars advantageously acquired through Mr. Zicot. I could hardly specify - I am merely wondering - and I cannot find a reasonable explanation for the shortcomings already noted in the instruction relating to the Obaix affair, which are essentially the work of magistrates.

End of quote. Again, here Bourlet is directly attacking Zicot, saying he might have corrupted magistrates through car business… It wouldn’t be a first for him.

When Georges Zicot was arrested during the first weeks of the Dutroux investigation in 1996, it’s precisely because of the truck theft story mentioned earlier and the following arrangement with Gérard Pinon to cash in on that sweet insurance money. The implication being that since he’s so directly involved in the Courcelles gang, he must be familiar with Dutroux, who himself is living partly thanks to his own car trafficking, everything looping back together. Dutroux had a backyard full of more than a dozen old cars and car pieces just sitting there at Sars-la-Buissière18. And he of course knew directly Gérard Pinon, Weinstein’s friend and landlord as well as Zicot’s informant.

Georges Zicot during his arrest (La Nouvelle Gazette)

There were massive car theft and trafficking rings operating in and near Charleroi at the time, and while Georges Zicot was the golden boy to some, for others, he was known as a corrupt and crooked policeman. Especially over Belgium’s eastern border, where German police forces said that he was running an international car theft ring19.

We simply never managed to approach several suspects in this car trafficking ring whose hub was in Charleroi.

This is what a spokesperson of the Cologne police had to say after Zicot refused to help them arrest their suspects unless they brought in a rogatory commission. The Germans were after a gang of thieves who stole BMWs in Cologne and then moved them to Belgium. Everything pointed towards Charleroi but the non-cooperation from Zicot made them raise their eyebrows, rightfully.

To get back to what Bourlet was insinuating, if such global car theft operations were covered up by Zicot, you’d think this guy would have the means to make magistrates look the other way when they stumble upon something he doesn’t want them to look into. And this is where a story about Mons’s attorney general (who was effectively also covering Charleroi, Zicot’s playground), Georges Demanet, comes to play.

The double car

Georges Demanet’s son Philippe is an automotive expert for prosecutor offices. He bought a rare brand new Porsche model at a car shop named Adam Auto Service, ran by Bernard Adam, the son of a police officer from Charleroi. Small world. It was later established that the car had been used for the past 2 years when it was bought “brand new” and that Philippe Demanet, an expert in his own right, seemingly didn’t (or didn’t want to) notice it. It could have easily been told from the chassis number. Later on, in 1993, while in vacation in Spain, Philippe declares his Porsche as stolen to his insurance company. Philippe cashes in on the money and later buys another brand new Porsche, the same model. With the same license plate. Cops notice it immediately when his garage is searched in 1994 and he’s accused of faking the theft of the car to get the insurance money. His explanation is that it’s not the same car, it’s just the same model, and he made a double of his personalized licensed plate that he was using on his first car when it got “stolen”, and he now had the original plates on. Which is illegal - can’t sport a copy of a license plate, but apparently that didn’t cause him any problems. Here’s where the even funnier stuff gets in : Georges Zicot was the cop in charge of the investigation into that Porsche in 199320.

The story of the son of a magistrate driving around a stolen Porsche after doing insurance fraud gets all over the news in September of 1996. Georges Demanet defends his son in Belgian newspapers before stepping down. He takes a two months leave before being retired early by Belgium’s Minister of Justice, Stefaan De Clerk. Turns out the Porsche was already “stolen” a first time in 1993 when Demanet got his hands on it, stolen from a guy named Yvo Van Onsem, who worked closely in transportation with Jan De Clerk, a parent of the Minister of Justice21. Small world, eh? Philippe Demanet also didn’t do much thinking after reporting his car as stolen in Spain, because a few days later, he’s flashed by a speed monitoring radar in Italy driving his Porsche, proving he was lying. He later brought it back to Belgium where he changed the chassis number in some shed in Charleroi. Demanet was charged in 1996 and awaiting trial.

And so now, after this tangent, Bourlet’s remarks start to cohere in a way that’s practically impossible to ignore : Georges Zicot, a corrupt cop in charge of car trafficking related cases in Charleroi, doing murky car business with magistrates, possibly the protector of Dutroux’s little gang, ends up with leading the investigation on a case that fits the Dutroux Modus Operandi, and yet, nothing is done about it, and Dutroux is not being considered as a serious suspect. There’s one more troubling coincidence that alerted me when I was reading about that Porsche story.

On March 24th 1995, upon finding out what his son had done in Spain and Italy, Georges Demanet called for a meeting with the Gendarmerie’s boss (Willy Deridder), Belgium’s national judge (André Vandoren) and a lawyer. The whole purpose of this meeting was to try and find a friendly way to resolve this story. Demanet is told there’s a separate investigation into stolen cars being set up in Brussels, and that he has to give out all his files. Panicking, he alerts his son, and tells him that he better get rid of that damned Porsche. Which he does. By selling it to a guy named Jean-Pol Taminiau who buys it for low money. Taminiau, an orbiter of the Courcelles gang, decides to store that Porsche inside one of… Gérard Pinon’s garage units22. The key to one of these units, unit 21, was found in Taminiau’s belongings. Taminiau was waiting on a guy called Thierry De Haan from Demanet’s insurance company “La Royale Belge” to have the paperworks ready to drive his new car. But De Haan now knows that this car is hot, and all the protections around it are basically gone. Taminiau was getting impatient, and during that time period, he’s always heard complaining and cursing on the phone about a “goddamn Porsche” by his family and friends. On April 2 1995, Taminiau is last seen at a bar (where he worked as a bouncer) at 4am, leaving with a gun in his belt. He’s never seen again.

On August 13th 1996, the day of Dutroux’s arrest, a fisherman picks up an human foot in the Bruxelles-Charleroi canal. DNA analysis establishes that it belongs to Jean-Pol Taminiau. His mother, grieving him but like everyone else, still turning on TV to watch the news about the latest developments of the Dutroux affair, recognizes Michel Lelièvre and Michaël Diakostavrianos after their arrest was shown on TV - Taminiau would talk about them because they worked at a friend’s garage. That friend is Daniel P. (name redacted). Daniel P. admits to having known Marc Dutroux, Michel Lelièvre, Michaël Diakostavrianos, Bernard Weinstein, Michelle Martin, Bruno Tagliaferro, and more23. Here we are with the Courcelles gang again. Who possibly could have wanted to kill Taminiau? Did the fact that he was orbiting the shady Dutroux related underworld make him too much of a liability for Demanet father and son? For Zicot ? There’s only 9 days in between the “friendly” meeting between Georges Demanet and officials and Taminiau’s death… Whoever murdered him was never found.

Philippe Demanet and Bernard Adam were finally judged for the insurance fraud in 2003. After being postponed multiple times, the trial declared them guilty, but they weren’t given any sentence since “they couldn’t have been judged within a reasonable period of time”. It’s not every day you see a trial being delayed for 10 years. Demanet moved to Madagascar after the sentencing.

There never was any trial for Jean-Pol Taminiau’s murder. The rest of his body was never found. Experts pointed to his ex girlfriend Nadège Renard and her new boyfriend Alexandre Varga as possible culprits, but their guilt could never be established as there was no body, no DNA match, and not even really any motive behind the murder. The case was given up on in 2011 after both Nadège and Alexandre died (a car accident and a suicide)24.

Georges Zicot had to wait until 2005 and the “Dutroux & car trafficking” trial that was differentiated from the larger Dutroux trial that started in 2004 to be put in front of a judge. A judge who immediately dismissed the claims made by Michel Bourlet as mere rumors. All the bribing and forgery charges against Zicot were dropped. He was cleared of any links with the Courcelles gang and Marc Dutroux25 as well of any wrongdoings. Zicot later filed a lawsuit against the Belgian state for 100.000 euros of “damages and interests”, covering a time period of 6 years of expenses where he was moved to Brussels following the accusations against him. He won that lawsuit and curiously, the decision was published in the Kingdom of Belgium’s official newspaper, the “Moniteur Belge”26, an extremely rare honor. And so as Zicot was officially innocent in the eyes of Belgian justice, no further investigations were lead into his Charleroi days. He’s now retired and often shares conspiracy videos about climate change, Russia, and France’s Emmanuel Macron on his public Facebook profile.

This the frustrating thing when researching this case, you think you’re onto someone who could be the missing link on the wider web network of people involved, only for them to be completely dismissed by Belgian officials and Belgium’s justice system. Even Michel Bourlet’s investigations are not enough. In my opinion, Georges Zicot was involved with Marc Dutroux’s underworld, maybe without realizing Dutroux was trafficking young girls as well as trafficking cars. He’s essential to the car trafficking aspect of Dutroux’s activities. Him not realizing Dutroux was kidnapping young girls doesn’t mean that Zicot was protecting Dutroux directly, but rather that he had to cover his own ass because if anyone went digging deeper into his activities, they’d see he had been hanging around the Courcelles gang for a while, and who knows, maybe had Dutroux as an informant or might even have indirectly financed some of his child trafficking operations.

To get back to the case that made me talk about Georges Zicot in the first place, Caroline’s kidnapping and murder attempt was never solved and ended up a cold case. Marc Dutroux and Bernard Weinstein’s DNA were eventually tested and they didn’t match the DNA from the case files27. Caroline was presented pictures of Dutroux and didn’t recognize him as the man who assaulted her.

But Jean-Pierre Verduyckt, a gendarme assigned at the Dutroux investigation cell in Neufchâteau, brought up Caroline’s case during Dutroux’s trial in 2004. He explained that Dutroux was changing his appearance quite frequently, including right after the kidnapping in Obaix. He also mentioned a witness who described someone who shared Dutroux’s figure28. But trying to prove guilt almost a decade later with no evidence is impossible. Did Dutroux kidnap and attempt to Murder Caroline that day of November 1995 ? We don’t know. I don’t know. Evidence says no. No DNA match would theoretically mean it’s not Dutroux or Weinstein, but it’s unclear where that sample came from exactly. The tests came after a year’s wait too. Did someone tinker with the DNA samples ? Who knows. I think it’s a question worth asking at least, and at the risk of sounding too much like a conspiracy theorist, this is something that I wouldn’t put past Charleroi’s police services. There’s absolutely no proof of that though. What if someone in Dutroux’s circles or even a collaborator of his like Lelièvre, took off on his own and decided to assault a girl the same way Dutroux did it ? Or tried to kidnap her and bring her back to him, only to panick, and try to kill her instead ? Same thing : We can speculate all we want, but the truth is, we’ll never know.

I just think it makes absolutely no sense for him to be dismissed that early in the investigation by one of Charleroi’s notoriously crooked cops only for this case to end up the way it does, a cold case. And then there’s the fact that no matter what, if the police services’ job had been done properly, René Michaux of the gendarmerie would have gotten his house search warrant and he would have found Julie and Mélissa alive. That’s a kick to the gut.

Marc Dutroux isn’t the only pedophile and criminal who’s active in the Charleroi region at that time, I think it’s also entirely possible that Caroline was abused by someone else. As a matter of fact, another notorious pedophile from France, Michel Fourniret29, was considered a possible suspect upon his arrest in 200430. The Charleroi police services transferred their files to the Dinant cell in charge of Fourniret’s case but nothing came out of it. This is not the first nor the last time Dutroux and Fourniret would cross paths, as a long believed victim of Dutroux, the young Elizabeth Brichet, would later be found out to be a victim of Fourniret. There even was a time when the two of them working together was thought of as a possibility, but again, no evidence proving it was ever found31. Earlier this month (it’s April of 2025 as I’m writing this), Elizabeth’s mom, Marie Noelle Bouzet, passed away. She was the instigator of the White March32 that took place in Brussels on October 20th 1996, an event that showed how much the Belgians truly cared about wanting to find out the truth about the Dutroux affair. I think her lifework of seeking the truth about what happened to her daughter - who went missing in 1989 and whose body was found in 2004, that’s 15 years (!) - and to other missing children was essential and inspiring. May she rest in peace. As for Fourniret, we’ll eventually get to him and his crimes through this series, or maybe a separate one. Keep your eyes peeled.

The original missing poster of Elizabeth Brichet, 1989

Finally, I wanna end this with another interesting coincidence. As I was saying, the former cop Jean-Pierre Verduyckt spoke up about Caroline’s case at the Dutroux trial. She’s not the only one he brought up. He also mentions Virginie Pinon, Gérard Pinon’s daugther. Him, again. At the end of August 1996, the young girl went to the police with her mother and her sister’s boyfriend. They were there to report a kidnapping attempt that happened in the summer of 1994 when Virginie was 13. Here’s part of her testimony to Charleroi’s police :

My father lives in Lodelinsart. […] Late in the afternoon, I was standing in front of a store entrance at the end of the driveway leading to my father’s house. Several times, I saw a gray car drive by in a short time. […] At one point, the car stopped right next to me. I got scared and ran off down the driveway towards my father’s house. The driver of the gray car followed me, also running. While running, I called for help from my sister’s boyfriend, Patrice Fouargé, who was at home. He came out of the house and called out the man who was following me, asking him what he was doing. […] The stranger replied “Nothing… I’m just looking around” and then he got in his car and drove off. I was nevertheless able to see the individual who was chasing me. A complaint was filed at the time. In fact, it was my father's statement that the police took, even though my father was not present at the time of the incident. […] Today, I clearly felt I recognized the man who had chased me two years ago. It was Marc Dutroux.33

Virginie says she recognized Dutroux from pics taken in 1994 and published in a then recent number of the French sensationalist magazine Le Nouveau Détective34 in 1996. The cop who received Virginie’s declaration that day simply didn’t take her seriously, writing it down in his notebook instead of writing a proper police report, despite her sister’s boyfriend also saying that the man he saw running after Virginie looked a lot like Dutroux. Nobody believed Virginie Pinon and the case simply died off… Until a few years later when investigators dived into the “car trafficking” aspect of the Dutroux case and a drawing was found during a search of Gérard Pinon’s house. It was a drawing made by Virginie in 1995. The drawing depicts a young girl who is chained and tied up to a chair with her pants down. Virginie never complained about abuse from her family. But her dad, Gérard Pinon, did know Dutroux and Weinstein well. Is it possible that she saw something she shouldn’t have ? Or simply heard about it. Nobody knows what the drawing meant exactly (even though I’d say it’s pretty clear) and it was impossible to ask Virginie because she died of cystic fibrosis in 1997, at only 17 years old. The drawing was found after her death.

This brings to an end the first part of this written series. Caroline and Virginie’s stories are only a few out of the many testimonies surrounding the Dutroux affair who never made it into the mainstream. Shining a light on these hopefully helps to realize that the Dutroux affair was the result of something larger and darker operating in the shadows of Belgium at that time period. Dutroux himself didn’t work alone, he had his little gang, that’s for sure, and so if there’s a network of people helping him out and there’s also others he’s working for, there might also be others just like him, running operations, abusing, kidnapping girls just like he does. And that’s terrifying to think about.

Next time in The Missing Pieces, I want to bring up the story of a child prostitution network who was operating in Belgium’s capital, Brussels, and who could possibly be related to big players of the Dutroux affair, like Michel Nihoul, but also a notorious Belgian gangster of the 80s named as a suspect in the Brabant Killers case, Patrick Haemers. It’s a story I’ve rarely seen talks about online, if any at all. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and as always, feel free to ask questions or adress remarks.

IRC_NIC

All books and articles excerpts translated by myself.

Footnotes here

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/69621073

[Original in Russian. Automated translation with minimal edits]

Russia's federal budget deficit increased again in July, the Finance Ministry reported on Tuesday.

Over 7 months, the government collected 22.112 trillion roubles in taxes for the treasury — 8.8% more than the previous year. At the same time, expenditures increased almost twice as fast as revenues — by 14.5%, to 28.567 trillion roubles.

As a result, at the beginning of August, a "hole" of 6.455 trillion roubles appeared in the budget — an amount equal to the annual budget of Moscow, four annual budgets of St. Petersburg and 11 annual budgets of large regions such as Tatarstan or the Krasnodar Territory. Compared to the same dates last year, the deficit has increased by 1.4 times and is already almost twice the plan for the whole year (3.786 trillion roubles).

The fundamental picture for the budget continues to deteriorate, states Finam strategist Yaroslav Kabakov: oil and gas revenues for the first seven months decreased by 16.8%, and the increase in revenues from higher VAT (by 24.9%) barely compensates for this shortfall. At the same time, the Ministry of Finance is spending more and more, and it seems that by the end of the year, expenses may exceed the plan by almost 5 trillion roubles, according to Kabakov's assessment.

Balancing the budget is becoming increasingly difficult, notes Ilya Sokolov, a leading researcher at the Gaidar Institute: the surge in oil and gas revenues due to the war in Iran turned out to be short-lived and was largely spent on subsidies to oil companies, whose refineries are burning and shutting down one after another.

Non-resource revenues are increasing only due to higher taxes, not economic growth, Sokolov emphasises: in the first half of the year, GDP grew by only 0.3%, and in the second half of the year, the economy may slide into recession. This will lead to a shortfall of 600-800 billion roubles in VAT, as well as in corporate and personal income tax, warns Sokolov. By the end of the year, the budget deficit could approach 10 trillion roubles, Khabakov predicts.

Military spending remains the main unknown for the budget: it is clear that it will exceed the plan, but it is not yet known by how much, notes Ekaterina Vlasova, an economist for Russia and the CIS at Bloomberg Economics. According to Bloomberg, the Ministry of Defence is demanding an increase in the military budget by 40%, or 4-5 trillion roubles. The Ministry of Finance planned to satisfy the military's appetite through debt, but in July it was forced to suspend government bond auctions due to the market collapse.

Most likely, after the State Duma elections, fiscal tightening should be back on the agenda, Vlasova warns: the authorities may cut spending on non-military items or raise taxes. Due to problems with raising debt, a new VAT increase is possible, according to economist Kirill Rodionov.

Since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, the budget has spent almost 50 trillion roubles on the war. To pay for the army and weapons production, the government spent three-quarters of the National Welfare Fund's available funds, introduced export and exchange duties, increased the mineral extraction tax, and confiscated private assets worth 4 trillion roubles. In 2025, income tax and personal income tax for wealthy citizens were increased, and in 2026, VAT and taxes for small businesses rose.

"The easy money for the Kremlin is over," says Agathe Demarais, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations: having started with businesses and billionaires, the authorities have switched to the wallets of ordinary people. This does not mean that Vladimir Putin "will soon run out of money, but he is definitely running out of politically acceptable ways to find it," Demaraïs emphasises.

...

Archived

According to Viginum [French national agency], the network consisted of 13 websites operated by China’s state broadcaster CGTN, or China Global Television Network. The portals published articles in English, French, Spanish and Vietnamese, presenting themselves as independent media outlets. In reality, they were part of a coordinated influence operation, which French authorities named Fawn Mianju.

As Russian aggression continues and Trump’s US threatens NATO, it is even more vital for a unified defence of the continent.

Timothy Garton Ash Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford

Russia’s Defense Ministry has claimed that Russian forces captured the village of Shcherbakivka in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, but the settlement was officially liquidated nearly three decades ago and no longer exists.

...

According to Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), Russian propaganda outlets have widely circulated the Defense Ministry’s statement, presenting the alleged capture as another battlefield advance by Russian forces.

CCD said Russian propaganda outlets have widely circulated the Defense Ministry’s statement, portraying the alleged capture as another battlefield advance by Russian forces. However, the claim is false: Shcherbakivka was officially removed from Ukraine’s list of populated places in 1997 after the settlement was left without residents.

...

The CCD described the Russian Defense Ministry’s statement as a typical example of disinformation aimed at creating the impression that Russian forces are making continuous advances along multiple fronts.

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On June 20, Russia's universities opened admissions for the new academic year. The government has eliminated 47,000 tuition-paying places and scrapped subsidized student loans for most fields of study. The first targets are programs in economics, management, and law at universities that do not specialize in those fields, but the cuts extend beyond those areas.

Combined with the abolition of the Bologna system and the government's ongoing effort to steer high school students out of secondary schools and into vocational colleges, these measures point to a sweeping overhaul of Russia's entire education system. In the coming years, the reform may help address labor shortages, but over the longer term it is likely to leave millions of Russians either with an education that does not match the needs of the job market or with no higher education at all.

...

Archived

Three times a week, limestone trains from Ida‑Viru County have begun passing through Eesti Raudtee's freight yard in Tallinn, heading to Pärnu County for Rail Baltica construction. A single freight train carries up to 1,800 tonnes.

Porsche has apparently left Volkswagen Group’s EU CO₂ emissions pool and will instead pool its new-car registrations with Chinese EV manufacturer Xpeng in 2026 and 2027. The arrangement could generate regulatory credits for Xpeng as its European sales grow.

The EU Commission and investors are launching a multi-billion euro fund so that promising tech startups no longer have to seek capital increases abroad.

The Buff Medical Resort in Germany is an £87 million, 118-room medi-spa that’s taking a revolutionary approach to wellness. Susan d’Arcy tries it out