In the Basque Country, “everything is being done” to find a 43-year-old woman, missing since June 21, whose ex-spouse was indicted for intentional homicide and imprisoned, the Bayonne prosecutor’s office announced on Thursday.
Laure Zacchello, mother of three children aged three, six and nine, has not given any sign of life since June 21, in Urrugne (Pyrénées-Atlantiques).
“Probably deceased”
Although “many uncertainties” still remain, “serious and consistent evidence leads us to believe that she is probably dead, possibly the victim of voluntary homicide by her spouse,” assured Jérôme Bourrier, public prosecutor in Bayonne.
Since February, she had been in the process of getting a divorce. A separation “clearly badly experienced” by the husband, a 43-year-old teacher, a former reserve officer in the gendarmerie who practices target shooting and hunting, presented as a survivalist.
It was the accused’s sister who alerted the police after discovering, on June 21, the body of her brother unconscious in the garden of the family home, a wound to the head, a concrete block next to him. On his body, “bruises and scratches”. In the house, “no traces of a struggle” but the personal effects of Laure Zacchello.
A call for witnesses launched
A “possible staging” according to the prosecution, in view of the testimonies of relatives and writings of the mother, who seemed “terrorized” by the ex-spouse, to the point of sleeping on the sofa with her children “and place objects around it to hear it approach.”
An automatic pistol and a submachine gun, kept in safes in the master bedroom, “opened but not forced”, have disappeared, Jérôme Bourrier stressed.
In police custody, the suspect, “with a cold and mute personality” according to the prosecution, assured that he did not remember anything. Searches are continuing to find the forty-year-old and an appeal for witnesses has been launched. Investigators are particularly seeking to trace the movements of the suspect’s vehicle, a bright red 4×4 with blue stripes on the sides, on June 20 and 21.
“He is a survivalist, sportsman and hunter who knows the hinterland perfectly well, we welcome any testimony,” declared Karim Fillali, head of the interdepartmental judicial police service.
