Marc Dutroux, the Belgian paedophile, claimed today that police officers helped him to abduct two young women whose bodies were later discovered buried in his garden.

Testifying for the first time at his trial, Dutroux said that he abducted An Marchal, 17, and Eefje Lambrecks, 19, with the help of a heroin-addicted friend, who is also on trial, and two other men.

"I later found out they were members of the police force," he told the court, without identifying them.

Dutroux, 47, a convicted paedophile, is testifying on the third day of his trial in the small town of Arlon. He is accused of kidnapping, imprisoning and repeatedly raping six girls in the 1990s, and killing four of them.

His defence team says that he was part of a large paedophile network that reached into the legal establishment.

Dutroux told the court: "It is regrettable that four people can never come back. I cannot repair that. If I hadn't agreed to do what I did they would probably be alive.

"I cannot accept all responsibility, but take responsibility for the role I played."

Dutroux told the court that one of the police officers and his alleged drug-addict accomplice, Michel Lelièvre, raped Ms Marchal after the teenagers were kidnapped while on holiday near the Belgian coastal town of Ostende.

But Dutroux denied murdering the two young women, who according to a post-mortem examination, were most likely to have been drugged until they were unconscious and then buried alive.

Dutroux said that he left the two young women with Mr Lelièvre and a French accomplice, Bernard Weinstein, whom Dutroux has today denied killing, after previously admitting to murder while in custody. The two men planned to force the women into prostitution.

Dutroux told the court: "I never thought that they were going to kill them. I find it a great shame that these girls died. It's a disaster."

Their bodies were discovered by the police in September 1996, buried in the garden of a property belonging to Dutroux.

A month before, the brutally abused bodies of Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo, two eight-year-old girls, were unearthed from another Dutroux property, along with that of Mr Weinstein.

Post-mortem examination reports showed that the children had starved to death after being raped and beaten.

Earlier, Dutroux blamed the three people standing trial alongside him: his former wife, Michelle Martin, convicted fraudster Michel Nihoul, Mr Lelièvre, and Mr Weinstein, his murdered accomplice, for the abduction of the eight-year-old girls in June 1995.

He said that he stumbled upon the girls in his home at Marcinelle, south Belgium, in the company of his former wife, Mr Nihoul and two others in July 1995, some weeks after they were abducted from the eastern city of Liege.

Ms Martin testified later that Julie and Melissa starved to death in Dutroux's basement in 1996 while he was in jail for three months for a car theft. She apologised for not feeding the girls, saying: "I know I have some responsibility in the deaths of Julie and Melissa. I was too scared to go down [into the basement] ... I regret infinitely what happened."

Dutroux told the court that he saw Mr Weinstein sexually abusing one of the eight-year-old girls. "I was angry," he told Judge Stephane Goux. But according to Dutroux, Mr Weinstein told him: "This is nothing compared to what will happen to them when they end up with Nihoul and company."

Dutroux then said: "My wife explained to me that it was better to hang on to them for a few days." Which was, according to Dutroux, why he built a secret cellar in the Marcinelle house, near the southern town of Charleroi, to confine the two girls.

Police rescued two more girls, Laetitia Delhez, then 14, and Sabine Dardenne, then 12, from that cellar in August 1996. Mme Dardenne intends to give evidence against Dutroux at the trial.

Dutroux entered no plea today, which is possible under Belgian law, which requires defendants to take the stand and answer questions from the judge.