Paris
Man was seen leaving an apartment in the Île-de-France region, where police later found bodies of women and children aged between nine months and 10 years
Tuesday, December 26, 2023, 4:04 p.m. GMT
French police who forcibly entered an apartment on Christmas Day found the bodies of a woman, a baby and three other children aged up to 10, prosecutors said.
The mother and her two older children, both girls, had been stabbed multiple times; The younger children, both boys, had no knife wounds but had apparently suffocated or drowned.
A man, who local media reported was the woman's husband and father of the children and who was seen on CCTV leaving the apartment in Meaux in the Île-de-France region east of Paris, was in police custody, it added the public prosecutor added on Tuesday.
A formal investigation has been opened into two charges: “intentional killing” of minors under 15 years of age; and the “intentional killing” of a partner, both charges carrying life imprisonment if convicted.
At a press conference, prosecutor Jean-Baptiste Bladier said police found a crime scene of “very great violence”, with blood everywhere, when they broke into the apartment on Monday evening after being attacked by a neighbor who was a close friend of the mother , had been alerted.
The neighbor said she became concerned when she had no contact with the 35-year-old women, who were originally from Haiti, on Sunday evening. She called the police after they showed up to check they were OK. She noted that the shutters were closed and blood could be seen on and around the front door.
Bladier said he visited the apartment shortly after police discovered it and it was “full of the effects of ordinary family life.” He said the mother and two daughters suffered “a lot of knife wounds… to the front and back of their bodies and to their limbs.”
None of the victims were named and Bladier said it was illegal to publish anything that could identify the children, ages 10, 7, 4 and 9 months.
He said medical documents at the apartment suggested the 33-year-old suspect, a trained plumber of French nationality, was suffering from depression and mental health problems. In November 2019, he was arrested and questioned after allegedly stabbing the woman in the shoulder six weeks before the birth of her third child. She refused to report the crime and refused help from victim support organizations, whereupon the case was dropped.
Bladier said the woman told police in 2019 that she and her partner met at school as teenagers and had been together for 14 years. They married in October this year, he said.
The killings come after Interior Ministry figures show that on average a woman is murdered by her partner or former partner every three days in France.
According to the French Interior Ministry's annual report published in September, in 2022, among the total 244,300 victims of domestic violence, 118 victims of femicide were registered, mostly women, an increase of 15% compared to 2021. The highest number of women killed by current or former partners occurred in 2019 with 146 victims.
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