A trial has been ordered against Dahbia Benkired, accused of the murder of Lola, a 12-year-old girl, in October 2022 in Paris. This decision, announced this Friday, follows an investigation which concluded that the accused was criminally responsible. She will be judged for “the murder of a minor aged 15 accompanied or preceded by rape, torture or barbaric acts as well as for rape committed against a minor with torture or barbaric acts”specified the Paris prosecutor’s office. Dahbia Benkired faces life imprisonment.
Lola’s lifeless body was found on October 14, 2022, in a plastic crate abandoned in the courtyard of her building, located in the 19th arrondissement of the capital. A few hours earlier, her mother had reported her missing after she failed to return from school. While looking for his daughter, her father, a caretaker of the residence who has since died, viewed the video surveillance images. He had seen Lola enter the lobby of the building in the company of an unknown woman, later identified as Dahbia Benkired, then the latter come out pulling a heavy trunk.
Lola died of asphyxiation
According to statements made during the investigation, Dahbia Benkired would have “forced (on Lola) to shower before committing sexual assaults and other violence against her which resulted in death. She allegedly hid the body in the crate”detailed the Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, in a press release. The autopsy revealed that the teenager died of asphyxiation and was carrying “multiple other lesions”especially at the neck, although no “traumatic lesion of the sexual sphere” has not been observed.
Me Clotilde Lepetit, lawyer for Lola’s family, welcomed
“an instruction which shows the seriousness of the work which has been devoted to this extraordinary criminal case”. She also added that “Ms. Daviet (Lola’s mother, editor’s note) wanted the highest level of legal debate to be held so that the terrible crimes committed against her daughter could be judged. We will have it”.
Dahbia Benkired’s lawyers, Mes Alexandre Silva and Lucile Bertier, for their part expressed to AFP their wish that
“the debates necessary for judicial truth will take place calmly, far from the media agitation and the nonsense of social networks”.
The alleged murderer was under OQTF
Dahbia Benkired, born in 1998 in Algeria, entered France legally in 2016 with a student residence permit. For two months before the events, she had been subject to an obligation to leave French territory (OQTF). This non-application of the measure had sparked strong criticism from several political figures, accusations that the government had denounced as being an “political recovery” indecent.
Psychiatric expertise concluded that Dahbia Benkired was criminally responsible, although her personality was described as “severe pathological” and marked by “high criminological danger”. A first expertise indicated that she was not suffering “of no psychic or neuropsychic disorder having abolished or altered his discernment”. She was initially placed in pre-trial detention before being incarcerated in a Unit for Difficult Patients (UMD) after her indictment.
