Tuesday, December 4, 2001, the police station in the Aubiers district, north of Bordeaux, received a worrying call from a father. His son, Larbi Fanousse, almost eleven years old, never came home from school. The first searches are launched: cellars, vacant lots, parking lots are explored and residents are interviewed. Some claim to have seen the boy going door to door to selling raffle tickets on the day of his disappearance.
The child’s body is finally found two weeks later at the foot of a waste bin, 500 meters from the town of Aubiers. Larbi Fanousse is partially naked, he was beaten and his head was wrapped in a disposable gown. On this garment, traces of sperm are discovered. The body would have been abandoned recently, the wasteland having already been explored.
A few days later, Alain Diaz, 41 years old, and his partner Marie-France, 40 years old, resident of the city of Aubiers, were arrested by the police. It must be said that the man is not unknown to the law: in 1983, he tried to strangle his girlfriend at the time, then in November 1997, he was again arrested for sexual assault on two little boys aged six and nine, including the son of his current partner. He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison, twelve of which were suspended.
In police custody, Alain Diaz denies having killed little Larbi, although The DNA traces found on the child’s body correspond to the genetic identity of the suspect. During the search of the Diaz family, the police noticed bloodstains that belonged to the child. They even got their hands on raffle tickets. Marie-France, the companion, psychologically fragile, is released. Alain Diaz, on the other hand, is indicted for kidnapping, sequestration and intentional homicide.
A stay in a psychiatric hospital
Faced with the clues presented by the investigators, he admits that he let the child come home to sell him raffle tickets. Larbi is said to have accidentally injured himself with a metal cabinet. There was a lot of blood, so Diaz allegedly smothered the little boy with a pillow to ease his suffering. Months later, he recanted: he did not kill the child.
His psychiatric journey is studied by the judge and the investigators who learn that, a few days before the kidnapping of little Larbi Fanousse, the suspect had a brief stay at the specialized Cadillac hospital, near Bordeaux. “He says he’s not well. He’s in crisis. But hey, the means are such today in psychiatric services that we can’t do more, says Me Sylvie Reulet, lawyer for the family of Larbi Fanousse In this case, we give them. medication to stabilize their moods and anxieties… And we let them go.” The individual returned to the establishment on December 6, 2001, two days after the disappearance, where he remained hospitalized until December 11.
Monday May 3, 2004, Alain Diaz, 43, found himself before the Gironde Assize Court, in Bordeaux. The accused immediately contests all confessions that he was able to formulate. The child’s clothes, found at his home, he had collected at the dump. According to him, it was a stranger who killed him, “someone who had found the keys to my house and entered when I was not there”, he said. After two and a half hours of deliberation, Alain Diaz was sentenced to life imprisonment. Same verdict on appeal. An expert psychologist presented it as “a man with a long history of pedophilia, a liar and manipulator, amoral, devoid of regrets, remorse and guilt”.
-Guests from “Hour of Crime”
– Me Sylvie Reulet, lawyer at the Bordeaux bar, lawyer for the family of Larbi Fanousse.
– Jean-Michel Desplos, head of the police-justice department for the newspaper Sud-Ouest in Bordeaux who followed the affair.
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