It isn’t normal what he did.”It was a sentiment echoed throughout the village, whose 700 citizens can scarcely believe what was going on in their midst.Dutroux had moved to the village with Ms Martin three or four years ago after his early release on good behaviour from a 13-year sentence for rape.He had no acquaintances in the village and was regarded as a thief. Now the same photographs are on every newspaper’s front page.As the full horror of the child sex scandal became apparent, the mood turned angry. There was fury at Melchior Wathelet, the former Minister of Justice, who allowed the early release from jail ofDutroux, the 39- year-old electrician at the centre of a suspected paedophile ring.There was bafflement that the police could have visited Dutroux’s home in Sars-la-Buissiere near Charleroi in the south of the country and failed to find anything – even when he was arrested and served time for robbery last year.But most of all there was a raging hatred for Dutroux himself, his second wife Michelle Martin – who was formally charged yesterday with being an accomplice in the abduction and illegal imprisonment of children – and the rest of the gang who have violated children in a country where the family is held sacred. The little girls’ faces stare out from the posters. But the appeals for help in finding them have been replaced with two simple words: never again.

As the investigations in Belgium’s own house of horror continued yesterday, anger was mounting.
When missing girls Laetitia Delhez, 14, and Sabine Dardenne, 12, were found alive in a makeshift concrete dungeon last Thursday, there was rejoicing. Joy turned to shock, however, when the bodies of eight-year-olds Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo were exhumed from the garden of convicted rapist Marc Dutroux in Sars-la-Buissiere on Saturday. Their faces had become familiar to all from posters their families had distributed around the country in a desperate attempt to find them. Erstwhile Perot supporters, it is said, are now likely to return to the Republicans, and Bob Dole, visibly re-energized by the success of the convention and the impact of his vice-presidential choice, Jack Kemp. Mr Perot, by contrast, has yet to find a credible running-mate. But if he can, then he may yet win enough votes to tip the outcome.. Relayed to 80 sites across the country, it was expected to raise $10m for the Democratic Party coffers.The conventional wisdom is that Mr Perot has no chance of repeating his 1992 performance.

“You saw the yachts, the special interest events,” Mr Perot said on CNN’s Larry King Show. “You don’t think these guys want something in return?”President Clinton’s gaudy birthday party-cum-fundraiser in New York on Sunday was open to similar criticism. Half the $30m cost of the San Diego convention has been met by companies. But he will be permitted to spend only $50,000 of his own money, and will therefore have to raise $33m in small individual donations, as he is entitled to do, if he is to match the $62m available to the Clinton and Dole campaigns.Making that task harder, Mr Perot also says he will refuse contributions by political action committees, a prime source of finance from corporations and special interest groups which he declares to be a scourge ofWashington.Yet as the Republican convention in San Diego showed – and its Democratic counterpart in Chicago will shortly show -corporate money flows as fast as ever.