The death of a young woman, whose body was found buried in western Paris' Bois de Boulogne wood on September 21, was turned into a controversial debate on immigration. While the alleged perpetrator of the 19-year-old student's murder, arrested in Switzerland late on Tuesday, September 24, is a Moroccan national, who had already been convicted of rape and subjected to a deportation order known as an obligation to leave French territory (OQTF), interior minister Bruno Retailleau said on Wednesday, September 25, that "our legal arsenal must evolve." The identitarian far-right circles, who are used to exploiting such events, have seized on the term "francocide," coined by leader Eric Zemmour, and have been organizing postering campaigns, using the same methods they did after the murder of 12-year-old Lola, who was killed in 2023 by an Algerian national, who was also under an obligation to leave the country.
Even some representatives of the left have spoken out on the case, such as Parti Socialiste leader Olivier Faure, who said on the news channel BFM-TV, on Wednesday, that "when you have someone in detention, an individual who you might think is a threat to French society, you shouldn't have to release them before you're even sure they'll be able to leave." Former president François Hollande, for his part, said, when questioned on the news broadcaster Franceinfo that this was "the problem of OQTFs: it has to be done quickly."
The controversy has overshadowed the speed of the investigation, which was described by a judicial source as an "investigative masterpiece." Although there were no prints at the crime scene, investigators were able to isolate several decisive time periods by analyzing telephone traffic in two areas: The Bois de Boulogne sector, and an area where a cash withdrawal was made using the victim's bank card, from an ATM in the eastern Paris suburb of Montreuil. Thousands of data points then had to be cross-referenced to identify the suspect's profile.
Taha O., aged 22, had been sentenced to seven years' imprisonment, by a juvenile criminal court in the northern Paris region on October 5, 2021, for a rape committed in 2019, while he was a minor. He had been detained 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 into charges of "murder," as well as "rape, theft and fraud, all offenses committed in a state of recidivism."
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