Patrick De Baets

Patrick De Baets is a Belgian gendarme, an adjudant of the third section (3e SRC) of the Brussels criminal investigation brigade (BSR), who conducted the first interviews of the anonymous witness X1, Regina Louf, in 1996 and 1997. According to a Senate proposal of October 2000, he has remained off the Neufchâteau inquiry since the summer of 1997.¹

The First Interviews

According to the Senate proposal tabled by Frans Lozie on October 9, 2000, De Baets was in the office of the Neufchâteau investigating judge Jean-Marc Connerotte to report on his financial inquiry into the assets of Marc Dutroux when Connerotte received a call from a Dutch-speaking woman, Tania, whose friend knew of grave abuse of children. Connerotte passed him the telephone because of the language. After some days Louf contacted De Baets, and a special cell under his direction videotaped her interviews, each summarized in French for Neufchâteau.¹ The parliamentary commission's complementary report of February 1998 records that the 3e SRC members were assigned to the related files of September 1996 on the basis of the anonymous witness's statements, that Connerotte put the caller's friend in contact with a Dutch-speaking investigator of the 3e SRC and issued a written instruction to that investigator to question her, and that the Neufchâteau antenna was set up in separate premises after November 25, 1996.²

The commission listed De Baets as "adjudant - 3e SRC de la BSR de Bruxelles" among the persons heard on October 14, 1997, with Aimé Bille, Michel Bourlet and others. Jean-Luc Duterme, Jacques Langlois and Jean-Claude Van Espen were heard the next day.³

Michel Clippe, a former adjudant of the Brussels BSR, told La Dernière Heure in 2020 that his work consisted of carrying out checks and verifications after Louf's statements and that he was able to verify a great deal of the information she gave, which proved accurate.⁴

The Dispute in the Antenna

The commission records that tensions in the antenna, present by December 1996 and January 1997, concerned the value of an anonymous witness's statements and the antenna's internal organization. On June 3, 1997 the Brussels BSR commander was sent a note by the antenna's commander, Duterme, which accused one investigator of manipulating an anonymous witness's interviews and of lacking objectivity.²

The Senate proposal places the start of the trouble earlier: from April 1997 the tension between Duterme and De Baets rose, and Duterme ordered colleagues of De Baets to reread the interviews and report on the credibility of the witness's statements and on possible manipulation of the interviews by De Baets's team. The proposal describes the first such report as very negative for De Baets and as totally lacking credibility.¹

In the Chamber of Representatives, the justice committee's interpellations of October 21, 1998 included one by Gerolf Annemans on the statements of gendarme De Baets on the manipulation of justice, and one by Vincent Decroly on the astonishing circumstances of the removal of De Baets and Bille from the Neufchâteau antenna.⁵

Removal

The Senate proposal states that Langlois ordered a complete rereading of the related files in the summer of 1997 and temporarily removed a number of gendarmes from the Brussels cell, and that De Baets and Bille have remained off the inquiry. The commission's own account describes the antenna's team as placed at rest on July 14, 1997 and temporarily withdrawn on August 26, 1997 by the Brussels BSR commander, with Langlois writing on September 2, 1997 that he opposed a definitive removal until the persons concerned could explain the grievances against them.²

According to the same Senate proposal, the inquiry into De Baets and Bille by the investigating judge Pignolet was closed without further action and a gendarmerie disciplinary inquiry acquitted them completely; the gendarmerie hierarchy stated that both had carried out their duties in an exemplary manner. They then filed more than eighty complaints for calumny, defamation and forgery against colleagues and magistrates who compiled the rereading file, and were kept from judicial police missions.¹ The Zembla description of its second programme, broadcast March 18, 2004, states that the gendarmerie leadership judged after some months that the inquiry had not been conducted correctly, that the investigators were suspected of falsifying a procès-verbal and that a judicial procedure was started, and that three years later an internal gendarmerie commission reported that they had done their work with integrity and professionally.⁶