A mother and her four young children were murdered at their home in a town near Paris over Christmas in what local police said was a “very violent” crime.
The bodies of the family members were found on Christmas Day in their apartment in Meaux, France, the AFP news agency and the Associated Press reported.
Prosecutors said the main suspect was the children's 33-year-old father and he was arrested Tuesday.
Neighbors alerted police after spotting a pool of blood outside the family's door, and officers then discovered the bodies, prosecutor Jean-Baptiste Bladier told reporters.
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He said the 35-year-old mother and two daughters, ages 7 and 10, were stabbed and two boys, a 4-year-old and the 9-month-old baby, suffocated or drowned.
“The mother and the two girls had suffered a lot of stab wounds,” AFP quoted the prosecutor as saying.
Flowers lay at the building gate where four children between the ages of 9 months and 10 years and their mother were found killed on December 26, 2023 in Meaux, France. Nicolas Garriga / AP
“The number of people is shocking, an entire family was killed and stabbed in cruel conditions,” Meaux Mayor Jean-Francois Cope told the AP. “It’s an absolute horror.”
The suspect had known his wife since high school and they had been together for 14 years, but this was reportedly not the first violent encounter.
Citing prosecutors, the BBC reported that the suspect attacked his wife with a knife in 2019, a month before the birth of their third child. This case was dropped. After his arrest in connection with his family's killing, the man told police he “knew why he was arrested” and “spoke of his unhappiness and depression,” Bladier said. The suspect was also seen with wounds on his hand.
The prosecutor said the man would undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
Neighbor Maissa Ketfi told the AP that the mother was “fighting for her children.”
“She never complained and one day you just learn,” she said Tuesday. “We all had a big knot in our stomachs last night when we found out about it. We were terrorized, four children and the youngest was nine months old. We can’t even imagine the scene.”
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