She called him “the Marcinelle monster”: Marc Dutroux in a police photo from 1996.
Over 200 pornographic photos have been found in the cell of Belgian pedo criminal and murderer Marc Dutroux. He says they were foisted on him.
February 25, 2026, 10:19 p.mFeb 25, 2026, 10:21 p.m
Remo Hess, Brussels / ch media
The Dutroux affair shook Belgium to its foundations in the mid-1990s. Now the child murderer, now 69 years old and imprisoned for life, is making headlines again: As the Belgian weekly magazine “Humo” reports, around 200 pornographic photographs were found during a search in Dutroux’s cell. Over 100 of them are said to show naked children.
The photos were seized in 2024. But it has only now become known that the Belgian public prosecutor’s office is conducting proceedings for possession of child pornographic material. Dutroux’s lawyer confirms this, but does not want to comment further on the content of the investigation.
Now the whole of Belgium is asking itself: How is something like this possible?
Dutroux has been imprisoned in the Nivelles prison in the southern part of the country for 30 years. He is in strict solitary confinement and only has physical contact with his lawyer Bruno Dayez. He lives largely isolated from the other prisoners.
Dutroux says the photos were foisted on him
According to Humo, Dutroux stated during the interrogation shortly after the cell search that he had found the photos in an envelope on his bed after a walk in the yard. They were probably placed there by other prisoners to “harass” him. However, it remained unclear why Dutroux did not report this find to the prison administration on his own initiative. His lawyer has called for additional investigations. Among other things, he wants to have an expert determine the age of the people shown in the photos.
The other and probably more likely variant is that Dutroux received the photos from a corrupt guard or a fellow prisoner. Belgian media are now speculating how he could have gotten the money for such a bribe. Dutroux is considered penniless. Only a man from Wallonia, who has been writing him letters for years, occasionally pays something into the prison account.
If Dutroux is convicted again, he could face an additional ten years in prison. However, he already has little chance of ever leaving prison again.
Theoretically, Dutroux could have been released conditionally from 2013 after serving life imprisonment. But custody applies to him. Most recently, in 2020, a psychiatric report found that Dutroux was still considered highly dangerous and had a psychopathic personality structure. His lawyers’ requests for release from prison, on the grounds, among other things, that prison until the end of his life was “torture” were rejected.
Long-standing rumors about political entanglements
The Dutroux case remains a dark trauma in Belgian society. Together with accomplices, including his wife Michelle Martin, Dutroux, who was already convicted as a child molester, kidnapped a total of six girls and young women in 1995 and 1996.
Two of the girls, both eight years old, starved to death in a cellar dungeon in Dutroux’s house in Marcinelle near Charleroi while Dutroux was in prison for car theft. He killed two young women aged 17 and 19. Sabine Dardenne and Laetitia Delhez, then twelve and fourteen years old, were rescued from the dungeon.
The investigation and the proceedings following Dutroux’s arrest were marked by numerous scandals. During a house search, for example, the screams of children trapped in the basement who later starved to death were simply ignored or ignored. Rumors about people in the know also persisted into politics for a long time. Dutroux himself fueled this speculation by saying that he was only a “supplier” for a larger network. However, the notorious liar interpreted this as an attempt to manipulate the public.
Citizens’ dissatisfaction with the authorities led to the so-called “White March” in 1996 with 300,000 protesters. The far-reaching state reform passed a little later marked the end of the “old Belgium” and was an indirect consequence of the Dutroux affair. (aargauerzeitung.ch)