UNLIKE the girls kept in the dungeon before her, Sabine Dardenne, who had been kidnapped while cycling to school, escaped with her life.

For 81 days, the 12-year-old schoolgirl was held hostage in the filthy cellar dungeon of the world’s most notorious paedophile. For every minute of every hour, she was chained by the neck so she couldn’t escape, half-starved, drugged and repeatedly raped.

Eight years later, she will now relive her ordeal in public, confronting her captor across a court room, as the star witness in the trial, which starts on Monday, of Marc Dutroux, accused of one of the most bizarre and horrific series of paedophile murders in history.

“I have waited eight years for this moment. I want to look him in the eyes and show him that despite everything he made me suffer I have not gone mad,” said Sabine a few days ago, the first time she had spoken publicly of her ordeal.

As well as the rapes and beatings, Sabine was tortured psychologically. Dutroux made her write letters to her parents and kept them to glean information about her. He told her that her parents had refused to pay a ransom, and insisted that he was protecting her from a “boss” who wanted her killed. “I can’t forget what happened, but I am alive and I can prove it,” said Sabine.

It is not just her testimony that is critical for the trial. While in the underground dungeon, she kept a secret coded diary in one of her school books: a cross meant Dutroux had visited her, and a star meant he raped her.

Dutroux, already a convicted child-rapist and a self-confessed killer, stands accused, with the help of three associates, of a total of 55 charges including the kidnap and rape of six girls, and the murder of four of them.

He claims, and many believe him, that he procured girls for a paedophile ring reaching into the highest political circles. The delay and incompetence in bringing him to trial has generated widely spread rumours of a web of establishment conspirators keen to cover it up. For many Belgians, it is not just Dutroux and his alleged accomplices on trial, but the Belgian state itself.

Belgium’s “trial of the century” is already causing intense anxiety, with the public aware they are about to relive the events of 1996 that did not just shake Belgium to its core, but also mesmerised the world in their gothic horror.

In early August of that year, a passer-by saw 14-year-old Laetitia Delhez being abducted and thrown into the back of a white van as she walked home from a swimming pool. The passer-by memorised the first three letters of the number plate: LNE, his sister’s intitials. The police traced the owner of the van to 128 Avenue de Philippeville in the depressed industrial city of Charleroi in the south of the country.

The three-storey terraced house, fronting on to a railway line and in the shadow of a flyover in a shabby, secluded neighbourhood, had a menacing aura. But when the police knocked on the door eight years ago, they had no idea they were about to unearth the appalling secrets of Belgium’s house of horrors.

Dutroux’s neighbours in Charleroi are wary of talking about the horrific events that have blighted their town, but one woman, who did not want to be named, said: “What do I tell my daughter? I have to try to explain it all to her, but it is impossible.” Georges, a morning drinker at a bar near Dutroux’s house, said: “He should be executed, without doubt. Look at what he has done, not just to those girls but to society, to Belgium.”

Police picked up Dutroux, a 39-year-old unemployed electrician, who, after a few days of questioning, told them: “I’m going to give you two girls.”

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