Mohammed Chahbar, 62, is suspected of the murder of a 15-year-old girl in 1988 and a 40-year-old woman in 2000 in Isère. He was indicted and placed in pre-trial detention Monday, according to the Nanterre public prosecutor's office.
Another intriguing criminal case in the same region: the disappearance in 1987 of Charazed Bendouiou, a 10-year-old girl in Bourgoin-Jallieu (Isère), also taken over by the Nanterre cold case center since 2022.
RTL has learned that a witness claims that the suspect knew the girl's father. This witness, who worked at the time in the household waste collection service in Bourgoin-Jallieu, indicates that Mohammed Chahbar was a colleague of Charazed Bendouiou's father.
The suspect rubbed shoulders with the girl's family
“He rubbed shoulders with him, Mr. Bendouiou, he worked with him, he came to see him at home, he rubbed shoulders with him. He came two, three times to see him at home,” he said. This witness confirms that the two men knew each other and that, two or three days before the disappearance of Charazed Bendouiou, Mohammed Chahbar was lurking in the parking lot at the foot of the Bendouiou family's building : “I remember, he was there. I said to myself, but what is he doing there. He’s weird,” he remembers.
For the witness interviewed by RTL, the little girl could have been kidnapped by this man she knew: “She must have said to herself, she knows my dad. She must have been coaxed because the little one, she wouldn't have gone with a stranger, or she wouldn't have let it happen. Even at ten years old.”
This man will testify in the coming days before the gendarmerie services. A testimony which should interest Grenoble SR investigators, who are seeking to determine whether Mohammed Chahbar could have committed other crimes.
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