Gangsters killed the girls, claims Dutroux

Alleged child killer and paedophile Marc Dutroux today took to the witness stand to deny involvement with the kidnapping and murders of two girls found buried in his garden.

Dutroux spoke for the first time on the third day of his trial in Belgium for a string of gruesome paedophile murders in the mid-Nineties. But in a rambling and sometimes contradictory testimony, the 47-year-old blamed the deaths on a criminal gang, saying: "I didn't want this to happen to them."

Dutroux is charged with the abduction and rape of six girls and the murder of four but told the jury that all the crimes of which he was accused were carried out by the gang based in the city of Charleroi which had enjoyed "police and political protection".

The last two victims survived his arrest in 1996 and were found in a makeshift cell in a cellar to which he had built a concealed door in a house in Marcinelle, southern Belgium.

Dutroux denied any involvement in the kidnapping and death of eight-year-olds Julie and Melissa, the first two girls to be abducted in July 1995, telling the court in Arlon he had found them at his home with his wife and two other men - Michel Nihoul and Bernard Weinstein.

Asked why he had built the trap door to the cell, in which the girls were held for months, he said: "I wanted to create a hiding place to spare them from being sent to a prostitution ring."

He accused co-defendant Nihoul, as well as Weinstein, a Frenchman found murdered and buried in Dutroux's garden in 1996, of planning to use the children for prostitution.

The trial continues.