Police investigating a three-decade-old murder that mystified France said on Thursday they had finally identified the four-year-old victim whose mutilated body was found by a motorway, and arrested her parents on suspicion of killing her.
The little girl’s body, bearing signs of horrific abuse including burns from an iron and human bite marks, was found in August 1987 in a ditch alongside the A10 motorway in central France.
Investigators at the time said they were dealing with a suspected case of cannibalism in which “flesh had been removed”. The bite marks on her body were likely those of a woman, according to forensic experts.
The grisly murder sparked what was France’s biggest ever investigation at the time, with the girl’s photograph posted in public places and an alert sent to more than 30 countries. It was declared unsolved in 1997 and remained a cold case until the 2016 arrest of her brother in an assault probe allowed the police to identify her through DNA which eventually led to the arrest of their parents, prosecutors in the central city of Blois said. His DNA was entered into a national database and alerted investigators to a match with material found on her clothes and the blanket she was wrapped in.
Interrogation under way
This allowed them to track down her parents, a couple of Moroccan origin. Their father, Ahmed Touloub, 66, was detained on Thursday after appearing before judges while their mother, Halima, 64, was still being questioned. The parents, who separated in 2010, were detained on Tuesday in the central city of Orleans on suspicion of murder, child abuse and preventing the lawful burial of a body.
Records showed they had stopped claiming family welfare payouts for one of their seven children, with a source close to the investigation saying the mother had said the child was in Morocco.
Prosecutors said that they have not admitted to carrying out the attack and that their statements have changed.
According to a judicial source, the father said he found his daughter dead after she fell down the stairs and he abandoned her body on the motorway while on the way to Morocco with his other children in the car.