2023-09-19 04:52:00
The place is associated with unspeakable crimes that shook an entire country. A memorial garden in tribute to the victims of Marc Dutroux was inaugurated on Tuesday in Charleroi, in place of the house where the latter kidnapped several little girls and teenagers.
The inauguration is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. in the presence of the parents of Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo, the two girls raped and kidnapped in this house in 1995-96, before their bodies were found buried in the garden of another property of the criminal .
These parents were associated by the city of Charleroi with the memorial project intended as “a place of calm”. With not a sculpture made of inert material but a garden of trees and flowers, “living organisms”, explains the Walloon municipality. Murielle has lived in the neighborhood for more than 40 years and is happy that the house has been razed. “This ugly house has been forgotten and it is now a garden, a little corner of paradise.”
At the corner of rue de Philippeville, in the suburb of Marcinelle where the “house of horror” stood, several plant species were planted at the foot of an immaculate white mural on which a child looks a kite twirling in the sky. The place was named “between earth and sky”.
“The gables of the houses which form the corner were covered with white glazed terracotta bricks, so as to catch the light very well to have a brilliant memorial”, explains to AFP Georgios Millis, the architect who led the project.
Cellars preserved from demolition
In June 1995 Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo were kidnapped in the Liège region. They were discovered dead in August 1996 in Sars-la-Buissière, in the garden of a property which was also destroyed last summer.
The investigation established that the two girls had been sequestered for many months in the cellar of Marcinelle’s house, where they were raped, before being deprived of care and food to the point of losing their lives.
The modest red brick house, scene of Dutroux’s worst crimes, burst into all Belgian homes when televisions showed on August 15, 1996 the criminal bringing the police there to extract from their hiding place two other kidnapped teenage girls, Laetitia Delhez and Sabine Dardenne.
Sentenced in 2004 to life in prison, Marc Dutroux, who is now 66 years old, was found guilty of having kidnapped, kidnapped and raped six girls and young women in 1995-96. Sabine and Laetitia, found two days following his arrest, are the only two of his victims to have survived.
dutroux Marcinelle
1695103496
#place #horror #transformed #garden #memory #Marc #Dutrouxs #house #razed #appeasement
