Electric tag plan for all children

David Rennie in Brussels

ELECTRONIC ID cards for all children under 12 are to be introduced in Belgium. They will bear a code designed to allow parents of missing children to be traced instantly.

The announcement came as Belgian police continued to search for two young girls, Stacey Lemmens, 7, and 10-year-old Nathalie Mahy, who vanished from outside a bar in the middle of the night, a fortnight ago, while their parents drank inside.

Abdallah Ait Oud, a convicted paedophile and serial child rapist, was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping. He has admitted being at the pub in Liege but denied involvement, saying he was incapacitated by alcohol and coke.

The girls’ parents have also been extensively questioned, revealing grim details of life in the post-industrial slums of French-speaking Belgium.

Christiane Granziero, Stacey’s stepmother, received a suspended jail sentence of 12 months last week for starving, beating and locking up her children in a basement while working as a prostitute. Catherine Dizier, Nathalie’s natural mother, also had her youngest child taken into care.

Though the ID cards, to be introduced from January 1, would be useless in protecting children from an adult determined to do them harm, they would offer a secure way of making sure a lost child can be reunited with his or her family as soon as possible.

Belgians are sensitive to the issues since the case a decade ago of Marc Dutroux, a paedophile killer who kidnapped six children, killing four of them, before being caught.