In Lyon, a mother tried for double infanticide again denies the facts
A mother, accused of the murder of her two daughters, aged 3 and 5, continued to deny the charges on Tuesday at the opening of her trial in Lyon.
A mother, accused of the murder of her two daughters, aged 3 and 5, continued to deny the charges on Tuesday at the opening of her trial before the Assize Court in Lyon. Quickly questioned at the start of the debates, Jamila El Rhoufi, 41, confirmed that she refuted any accusation of the murder of her children.
This gendarme’s wife is tried for having given the death to two children on June 10, 2018 in the apartment of the barracks of Limonest, near Lyon, in the absence of her husband who was participating in a sporting event.
According to an autopsy report, the two girls were victims of “mechanical suffocation-type asphyxiation”. “The youngest’s blanket bore traces of blood or vomit, it was not even analyzed,” pleaded Me Alexandre Plantevin, whose defense is implicitly based on the thesis of fatal food poisoning and breaches of investigation.
“No substance was found in the body of the victims, the hypothesis has not been verified,” he replied to an investigator at the bar.
“I always thought it was normal, I didn’t tell anyone about it”
During this weekend, the brother of the accused and his sister-in-law, who then paid him a Sunday visit, discovered an apartment “plunged in the dark” with a “smell of problems”. The couple initially only saw the eldest child, “like a zombie” in front of her phone screen. After lunch and a nap, the mother then suggested to her sister-in-law to pick up the girls in their room. She called herself out of their “pallor” as her sister-in-law grew alarmed and her brother tried to revive them before help was called. The couple will be heard as witnesses on Wednesday.
Coming from a family of seven children in northern France, Jamila El Rhoufi was placed in a foster home at 16 because of her father’s violence. Kidnapping attempts, forced marriage plans, his course is marked by brutality.
“I was beaten up. I have always found it to be normal, I have not told anyone about it, ”said the accused. After leaving the home, the young woman held positions as saleswoman and waitress in Nice, then in New Caledonia where she met her future husband, a mobile police officer, via social networks.
The couple returned to the metropolis and then married 2012. After a stay in Reunion Island and the birth of their two daughters, the couple settled in 2017 in the Limonest gendarmerie barracks. The tendency towards mythomania of the mother of a family, sometimes calling herself a municipal police officer in Noumea, sometimes “singer in a large apartment”, was noted by several witnesses. The weekend of the drama, she had left messages for her brother and her sister-in-law on the pretext of a marital dispute to dissuade them from coming.
Messages with suicidal connotations, donation of clothes and toys to school just before the weekend, attempt to dissuade a family visit: a series of elements also confirmed the thesis of an imminent tragedy, according to the investigators.
“Do you understand that one can think that you are a liar?”, Asked the general counsel to the defendant who, glare, was then walled in silence. For Me Plantevin, his lies were only a little derisory way of “telling his dream life”. “I have set goals that I wanted to achieve,” rephrased Jamila El Rhoufi.
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