Police Continue Search For Missing Girls

Police dug in the mud during a heavy rain Wednesday searching for the bodies of young girls in Belgium’s widening child sex-abuse investigation.

Waterlogged investigators painstakingly shoveled out holes up to 6-feet deep in the yard of a house owned by a key suspect. By the end of the second day of searching, no remains had been found.

Digging was to resume today and could continue into Friday.

“We will systematically search the whole grounds and the house,” Police spokesman Jean-Marie Boudin told a news conference.

Authorities believe the house offers the best chance yet of advancing an investigation that has led to 10 arrests in the last two weeks and pushed Europe to reassess its efforts to fight child sex abuse.

Attention has been focused on this industrial town since Marc Dutroux, a convicted pedophile, was arrested Aug. 13. Two days later, two sexually abused girls, aged 12 and 14, were found alive in a cellar of one of his seven houses near Charleroi, 40 miles south of Brussels.

Dutroux then led police to the bodies of two 8-year-olds buried in the yard of a different house.

Police initially pursued leads that the two might have been sold to foreign brothels. But the presence here of the chief investigator into their disappearance indicated police were looking for their bodies.