Memorial for Slain Girl Draws 20,000

More than 20,000 people, including representatives from the royal family and the government, attended a memorial ceremony for a young girl whose body was found in a gas station basement five years after her abduction--the latest in a spate of child-sex crimes that have rattled Belgium. The memorial for Loubna Benaissa, held in a Brussels mosque and broadcast on national television, renewed the national pain, grief and shame set off by the failure of Belgian police to properly investigate the previous child-sex crimes. The body of the slain girl, who was 9 when she disappeared in 1992, was found stuffed in a trunk in the basement of a gas station near her Brussels home.