Trial of the A10 martyr: parents of Inass Touloub tried in Blois, 39 years after her death
The parents of a four-year-old girl whose mutilated body was found beside the A10 motorway in 1987 are appearing before the assize court of Loir-et-Cher.
Parents of Inass Touloub before the assize court of Loir-et-Cher
According to leparisien.fr, the trial of the "A10 martyr" opened on Monday 2 November before the assize court of Loir-et-Cher in Blois, nearly forty years after the discovery of the mutilated body of a four-year-old girl beside the motorway. Hearings are scheduled until Friday 18 November.
The mother, Halima El Bakhti, is being prosecuted for "torture and acts of barbarism resulting in death without intent to cause it". Her father, Ahmed Touloub, is answering charges of "complicity". Both face life imprisonment. After a period on remand, they were released under judicial supervision and are therefore appearing freely at the bar.
A macabre discovery in the height of summer 1987
Everything began on 11 August 1987, in the afternoon. Two agents from the Cofiroute company were clearing vegetation from the sides of the A10 motorway when, around 15:00, at kilometre 135 on the Orléans-Blois stretch, they discovered a "package". Wrapped in a blue woollen blanket, a small girl lay in the grass, dressed in white cotton pants, a striped vest and a checked dressing gown. Her hair was brown and curly. Her age was estimated at between 3 and 5 years.
The body bore clear signs of ill-treatment: fractures, a broken rib, burns attributed in particular to an iron, bruises scattered across the entire body and face, and around fifteen bite marks. "It is quite obvious that we are dealing with a child who has been beaten, and this has been going on for a long time," noted the expert assessment contained in the investigating chamber's decision.
Thirty-one years to give the child an identity
On 9 September 1987, the girl was buried in the cemetery of Suèvres, a village of about 1,300 inhabitants close to Blois. Plainclothes gendarmes discreetly watched the ceremony and the area around the grave for weeks, hoping to see a remorseful murderer come to pay their respects. In vain.
The investigation extended throughout Loir-et-Cher and the neighbouring departments. The child's face first circulated in the form of a sketch, then in a retouched photograph. The wanted notice was posted in 65,000 schools and 30,000 town halls, in every police station, gendarmerie, post office, railway station and airport in the country. Her details were circulated in more than 30 countries, notably Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The first investigating judge, Georges Domergue, focused on a family of North African origin, given the child's Mediterranean features.
The civil status of 388 girls born between 1983 and 1984, for whom the state could not account for their whereabouts, was checked—without result. After five years of searching, a first dismissal order was issued in 1992.
Television appeals and a new autopsy, without success
On 1 March 1993, 9 million television viewers followed the first broadcast of "Witness Number One", a programme presented by Jacques Pradel on TF1, created specially for this case. Around a hundred calls were logged and the prosecution reopened the investigation, although no conclusive leads emerged.
In December 1995, investigating judge Françoise Benezech had the body exhumed for a new autopsy. The samples did not allow the girl to be identified. A further dismissal order was issued in 1997. For nearly a decade, the case lay dormant, although successive judicial officials continued to monitor the statute of limitations.
It took finally 31 years of investigation and perseverance for the child's identity to be established, in 2018: Inass Touloub. Since then, her grave in the small cemetery of Suèvres, long marked only with the epitaph "In memory of the unknown little girl of the A10 motorway", is among the most decorated graves in the cemetery.
A trial described as "exceptional"
Fabrice Belargent, prosecutor general at the appellate court of Orléans, describes this trial as "exceptional". Substantial resources have been deployed to enable hearings to take place within the courthouse of Blois, which is poorly suited to debates of this media scale. The case constitutes one of France's oldest "cold cases" and has fuelled judicial chronicle for decades.
"No, parents do not have the right of life and death over their children," declared a judicial official cited by leparisien.fr, underlining the symbolic and legal significance of a trial awaited for nearly four decades.
Pierre Bouyssic, first deputy prosecutor of the Republic of Blois at the time of the body's discovery, summed up the state of mind of the investigators in a documentary series broadcast on Canal+: "We all swore to find whoever did this." Rémy Maunier, then head of the gendarmerie search and rescue section in Orléans, for his part recalled the technical constraints of the time: "We do not yet have the possibility of carrying out DNA searches. We work on pure intelligence gathering."
Source: Google News LU FR