The news and news-recovery machine was set in motion and, aided by emotion, the murder of a young woman, whose body was found on 21 September buried in the Bois de Boulogne, rebounded into the immigration controversy.
While the alleged perpetrator of the murder of the 24-year-old student, arrested at the end of the day in Switzerland on September 24, is a Moroccan already convicted of rape and subject to the obligation to leave French territory (OQTF), the Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau, declared on Wednesday, September 25 that it was necessary “developing our legal arsenal”.
Accustomed to such revivals, the extreme right-wing identitarian circles have taken up the term “francocide”, invented by the polemicist Eric Zemmour, and are organising collages of posters, using the same methods as after the murder of 12-year-old Lola, killed in 2023 by an Algerian citizen who also had to leave French territory.
Even representatives of the left have stepped forward, such as the first secretary of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, who considered, on Wednesday 25 September on BFM-TV, that “When we have someone in custody, who is an individual we can consider a threat to French society, we should not have to release him before we are sure he will be able to leave.”. Former President of the Republic, François Hollande, accused him on Franceinfo “The OQTF problem: it has to go away quickly”.
“Masterpiece of research”
The controversy overshadows the speed of an investigation described by a judicial source as a “masterpiece of research”. Without a genetic fingerprint at the crime scene, the investigators of the criminal squad managed to isolate several decisive time sequences by analysing telephone traffic in two areas, the Bois de Boulogne sector and the one where cash was withdrawn from a bank machine in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis) using the victim’s bank card. They then had to cross-reference thousands of data to identify the profile of a suspect.
Taha O., 22, was sentenced on October 5, 2021 by the Val-d’Oise juvenile court to seven years in prison for a rape committed in 2019 when he was a minor. He was arrested in 2019 and released at the end of his sentence in June 2024, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office, which opened a judicial investigation on Tuesday, September 24 on charges of “murder” as well as “rape, theft and fraud, all crimes committed by repeat offenders.”
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