Initially interned for “delusional comments”, the 42-year-old man suspected of having kidnapped and killed his stepdaughter in Seine-Maritime last July was indicted for “murder of a minor under 15 years old”.
The investigation into the death of Célya, a six-year-old girl killed this summer in Seine-Maritime, is progressing. The child’s stepfather, suspected of having kidnapped and then killed on the night of July 12 to 13, was indicted and placed in pre-trial detention, the Rouen prosecutor’s office said this Friday, October 4. Aged 42, the suspect was indicted on September 26 for “attempted murder of a spouse,” “kidnapping a minor under 15 years of age” and “murder of a minor under 15 years of age,” said the prosecutor’s office, confirming information from Paris-Normandy. He was placed in pre-trial detention at the Rouvray hospital center where he had been automatically hospitalized following his police custody in mid-July due to disturbances and ideas “delirious”, according to this source.
Célya was found dead on the night of July 12 to 13 in a wooded area in the town of Saint-Martin-de-l’If, a few hours after being kidnapped by her mother’s companion. The latter had been arrested in the same area. L’“external review” of the girl’s body had “highlighted facts of extreme violence, a major smashing of the child’s skull to the back of the head which very probably caused his death”. “Armed with a knife”, the man had left himself “to call out smoothly”, the prosecutor then declared.
“It was like a stroke of madness”
It was the little girl’s mother who called the gendarmerie on Friday July 12 shortly before 6 p.m. to say that she had just been attacked with a knife by her companion. The man apparently took cocaine several times during the day and attacked the little girl for an unexplained reason. “It was like a stroke of madness,” then reported the mother, interviewed in the morning at the hospital by the investigators and who herself received stab wounds and presented “nine plagues” on the body.
The forty-year-old had already been sentenced “five times” since 2009 for drug cases and “incarcerated for this type of act”had also detailed the Rouen prosecutor. The man was also known for behavioral problems, according to a source close to the investigation, but the couple had not been reported for domestic violence.
The disappearance of Célya had triggered a “kidnapping alert”, a system adopted in France in February 2006 which consists of launching a massive alert in the event of the abduction of a minor child to mobilize the population in the search for the child and his kidnapper. It was only the second time a child has been found dead since its launch in 2006.
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