BRUSSELS — In a dank basement by the oily waters of the Brussels-Charleroi canal, police diggers in black jumpsuits uncovered the latest trove of horrors: a skull, a wisdom tooth, bones from fingers, three kneecaps, scraps of undergarments.
For Boutiri family members--Moroccan immigrants next door--the grisly find filled them with such terror that they have put their two-story stone home up for sale.
"We feel we are living in a cemetery," said Zora Boutiri, 23, a clothing saleswoman whose mother is now too afraid to get out of bed for middle-of-the-night Muslim prayers. "Where will the next body be found? On our roof? In the canal out front?"
As chilling fogs linger in the streets of Brussels, police investigators are assembling gruesome details of the latest installment in a nation's nightmare.
The killers this time are believed to be an immigrant Protestant clergyman from Hungary, the Rev. Andras Pandy, and his oldest daughter, with whom he allegedly had an incestuous relationship.
The victims, and no one is sure yet how many there are, appear to have included Pandy's first and second wives, four of his eight children and an unknown number of others.
Once again, small and supposedly tranquil Belgium is being forced to face macabre evidence of its darkest side and to ponder what it means for a land rent by linguistic and ethnic division.
"We have come to expect only bad news in Belgium," Boutiri said.
It was only a little more than a year ago that 350,000 people, a huge assembly for a nation of 10 million, marched in silence through the streets of Brussels to express their anger and outrage over another case: the official bungling and possible high-level cover-up in the investigation of kidnappings of a number of children.
Too late, the bodies of four girls who had been abducted and sexually abused were found in jury-rigged dungeons in the southern city of Charleroi. Marc Dutroux, a 40-year-old unemployed electrician who had already been to prison for kidnap and rape of minors, and his schoolteacher wife and convicted accomplice in the earlier crimes were charged in the deaths.
A parliamentary inquiry into the Dutroux affair found numerous instances of institutional bungling and corruption and concluded that police and judicial agencies failed so abjectly as to "put at risk the state of law."
"Corruption and spinelessness are eternal," Hugo Claus, this country's most celebrated Flemish-language writer, said in a recent newspaper interview. "Stupidity and mediocrity accompany our existence. And in Belgium, this is amplified."
In recent years, it has seemed increasingly likely that this Maryland-sized kingdom, formed in 1830 from an unlikely amalgamation of French-speaking and Flemish-speaking territories, is fated to break up or survive only as a loose confederation.
Last year's "White March" on behalf of Dutroux's victims at first seemed to weld the country together like nothing before.
"People said at the time, 'There are still Belgians,' " said Regine Brandon, a 36-year-old Flemish woman from the coastal town of Knokke-le-Zoute.
But the momentum quickly died.
"Those who believed the White March meant that Belgium would be re-cemented were totally mistaken," said Claude Javeau, professor of sociology at the Free University of Brussels. "Belgium is now in decomposition; that's clear."
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Dutroux's arrest in August 1996 did not end the hideous discoveries, which have only stoked "suspicions," in Javeau's view, that the current governmental and legal systems have failed.
Last March, the body of a 9-year-old girl, Loubna Benaissa, was found in the cellar of a gas station in Ixelles, near here. She had been missing since 1992. A 34-year-old neighbor whose family owns the gas station was arrested on charges of abducting, raping, torturing and murdering her.
In Mons, a southern town that is home to a major command post for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a killer dubbed the "Dismemberer" left bags of severed body parts cut from at least four young women's corpses. The killer, unidentified and at large, is so gifted with a knife that authorities suspect he had medical training.
In any event, he has a warped sense of humor: Some of his grisly cargo was dumped in spots with names such as "Legs Street" and "Sorrow Road."
Now, Belgians' attention has been riveted by the alleged crimes of the stout, disheveled and bespectacled Pandy and his 39-year-old daughter, Agnes, a quiet, diligent employee in the maps department of the Albert 1st Royal Library.
Pandy was arrested Oct. 17 on a complaint filed 15 years ago by Agnes. The young woman claimed that her father had been her lover and blamed him for the disappearances of six people: her mother; Pandy's second wife; and four of her siblings or step-siblings.
The original investigation, closed in 1993 for lack of evidence, was reopened earlier this year by prosecutors anxious to prevent a repeat of the bungling that marred the Dutroux affair.
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