Murder of Chahinez Daoud in Mérignac, chronicle of an announced legal fiasco

On March 15, 2021, Chahinez Daoud slipped between two downpours to go to the Mérignac police station, a stone’s throw from Place Charles-de-Gaulle. The building is cramped, degraded, dilapidated. The ceiling seems ready to collapse at any moment. Sometimes the receptionist even wades in toilet water. This 31-year-old mother of three children and town hall employee in the school catering of the local school absolutely wants to file a complaint against her husband, Mounir Boutaa, with whom she is in the process of separating.

That morning, her companion, a 45-year-old mason, kidnapped her in a supermarket parking lot, before hitting her several times and trying to strangle her. The police officer who took the complaint was himself, three months earlier, the perpetrator of domestic violence: the Bordeaux criminal court had, on February 10, sentenced him to an eight-month suspended prison sentence with non-registration of this conviction in the B2 criminal record, a bulletin accessible to the public administrations of the State when they receive, in particular, applications for employment within the public service.

Failure chain

This police officer constitutes the first link in a chain of failures which, on May 4, 2021, will lead to tragedy: that day, shortly after 6 p.m., and despite pleas and cries, Mounir Boutaa burned his wife alive in the middle of street, a few meters from her home, where she lived with her children aged 3, 5 and 8. The Franco-Algerian was arrested half an hour later in the neighboring town of Pessac. He carried a 12 gauge rifle, a gas pistol and a cartridge belt. To investigators, the person concerned declared that he wanted “to punish” Chahinez, “without killing her” and the “burn a little to leave marks on it“. The Bordeaux public prosecutor’s office then opened an investigation into “intentional homicide by spouse” and “destruction by fire”.