A number of Dutch and French language books have appeared on the Dutroux affair since 1996, with one standing out above the rest. This is the generally hard-to-get 1999 book 'The X-Dossiers', written by respected investigative journalists Marie-Jeanne Van Heeswyck, Annemie Bulté and Douglas De Coninck. Page after page they explain how the most important aspects of the whole Dutroux investigation, in which Dutroux ultimately became a minor detail, were manipulated and finally discarded. The book presented the most powerful case possible for a massive cover up. However, there was one thing the authors couldn't do and that was to publish the names of those who had been accused by a whole range of witnesses. The reason is obvious: if the authors would have published these names they would have been paying damages for the rest of their lives.

A lot of information in this article can be found in the book 'The X-Dossiers', with the primary difference being that all the names of the alleged abusers have been included. This has become possible because the Dutroux dossier, including the testimonies of the X-witnesses, were leaked to a number of reporters in the late 1990s. Both the final Dutroux dossier, which has largely been sanitized from any important information, and a summary of official reports from August 1996 to May-June 1997 have been used by this author to verify the claims made in a number of books and to find out the identities of the alleged abusers. Seeing the names and reading the biographies can be quite a shock initially, but it will also clarify how a cover up of this magnitude was possible.

The power of the Dutroux affair and its X-Dossiers is that it will enable anyone to see how a state can be controlled and undermined by a cabal that is able to place its "members" in crucial positions in any investigation that might lead to its own exposure. The question of why the majority of the media is so cooperative is the only aspect that cannot be fully explained in this article, although it can be shown that the media is willingly working with official investigators in manipulating and debunking all aspects of an investigation that are not appreciated by this cabal.

Some might find it unethical to publish the names of mere suspects, especially when talking about child abuse. The author fully agrees with this argument, but only under normal circumstances in which an investigation is carried out the way it should be. This has not happened in the Dutroux affair, in which the honest, competent and dedicated researchers, together with the most important witnesses, have unjustly been persecuted, harassed, tarred and feathered by the media and the judiciary, with help from some of the alleged child abusers. That's why the investigation, which has been dead and buried for many years now, should be taken public. And let's not forget that the X-Dossiers involve a whole range of witnesses whose claims overlap and in many cases involve highly specific details that have been verified by detectives. It can also be argued that the mainstream press was anything but discrete in late 1996 when they published the names of the politicians Elio Di Rupo and Jean-Pierre Grafe as alleged child abusers. The evidence these claims were based on was meager to say the least and many times less powerful than the combined testimonies of the X-witnesses. But, of course, the purpose of this event was not to inform the public; it was an effort to discredit the rumors about high level involvement in child abuse networks. It was known that sooner or later the X-witnesses would reach the news and this was one of the "pre-emptive strikes" against these witnesses.