Belgian girls were strangled, one raped

Two Belgian girls found dead on Wednesday had been strangled and one of them was raped, prosecutors said yesterday of a crime that has shocked Belgium and revived painful memories of paedophile killer Marc Dutroux.

A man already being held over their abduction will be charged with their murder, prosecutors added.

Stacy Lemmens, seven, and Nathalie Mahy, 10, went missing during a street festival in the eastern city of Liege on June 9. Since then their faces have been staring out of posters on shop windows and in public buildings across the country.

Public prosecutor Anne Bourguignont told a news conference that autopsies showed both girls had been strangled and that the older of the two had marks showing she had been raped. They had probably been killed around the day they went missing.

Belgian authorities had charged a local man, Abdallah Ait Oud, with the girls' abduction. Mr Ait Oud, who says he is innocent, handed himself in after police said they were searching for him.

"The charges will be extended to rape and murder," Ms Bourguignont said.

Belgian media made repeated references yesterday to Dutroux, who was arrested in 1996 and later found guilty of kidnapping and raping six girls. He killed two of them and left two others to starve to death in a makeshift dungeon.

"The horror again," wrote La Libre Belgique newspaper on its front page below a picture of the site by railway tracks where the bodies had been dumped.