A 12-year-old girl was raped, tortured and murdered by a migrant who was supposed to have returned to Algeria, a court has heard.
Lola Daviet was allegedly lured into an apartment in Paris by Dahbia Benkired, 27, who severed her head and suffocated her as revenge for the girl’s caretaker mother refusing to give the migrant a key to an apartment block.
The schoolgirl was slashed with scissors and a box cutter then bound up in duct tape, including around her face, leading to her death by asphyxia on October 4, 2022.
She was seen entering the building with Benkired at around 3pm before being taken into an apartment, and it is alleged she was forced to undress and wash herself, then perform a sex act on Benkired ‘for her pleasure’.
Benkired left the building at 5pm and the young girl’s dead body was thrown into a plastic trunk which she dragged around Paris before dumping on the street. It was later found by a homeless man at around 11pm.
Horrific images of Lola’s naked body squashed into the trunk were shown to the Assize Court on Friday, prompting her family to walk out.
The shocking photographs showed her arms bound together and her face completely covered in tape. A large wound on her jaw, a severed neck and a slashed back could also be seen.
The killer, who was homeless and unemployed, settled in France in 2013, aged 14, but was subject to an expulsion order after overstaying a student visa in August 2022, just two months before she murdered Lola.
The presiding judge of the court told the jurors that Lola’s ‘head was partially severed’ at the neck.
The 12-year-old girl was ‘vaginally and anally penetrated’ while she was still alive, according to the medical examiner’s examinations.
Building residents saw Benkired in the lobby of the apartment block in the 19th district, carrying suitcases and a heavy trunk covered in a blanket, the investigation showed.
An hour and a half earlier, security footage showed Benkired approaching the girl as she returned from school, then leading her into the flat her sister occupied in the building.
She placed the body in a trunk and exited the building, pausing outside a cafe, where she told a client who suspected something strange in her luggage that she was ‘selling a kidney’, investigators said.
She is then said to have convinced a friend to drive her and the bags to his home, before taking a taxi with the trunk back to the building where her sister lived.
She fled when she saw police deployed in the area, but was arrested the next day.
A police investigation revealed that a pair of scissors, an oyster knife and an IKEA knife were found in Benkired’s flat with traces of blood.
Speaking in court, Lola’s mother Delphine Daviet, who was wearing a white T-shirt with a picture of her daughter, demanded ‘justice’.
The girl’s family sat in court on Friday, wearing matching t-shirts with the words: ‘You were the sun of our life, you will be the star of our nights.’
The Algerian killer had a tough upbringing with aunts before she settled in France in 2013, the investigation showed.
She told the court that she had been abused by family and neighbours as she grew up, claiming her aunts ‘forced her to watch pornographic films… and groped her in the forest.’
It was reported at the time of the killing that she was was the subject of an expulsion order, prompting stinging criticism from the right and one of the most bitter political debates in recent memory.
Asked why she didn’t want to return to Algeria, Benkired said: ‘I feel free in France. In Algeria, we have no life. There was no reason. I studied here, I grew up here, I have my whole family here. What am I going to do there?’
She claimed to have suffered something of a mental breakdown following her parents’ deaths in 2019 and 2020. She said she would smoke up to ’20 [cannabis] joints a day’ to deal with this ‘tipping point’.
She had overstayed a student visa and had failed to comply with a notice issued in August to leave France within 30 days.
She told investigators she had been angry with the girl’s mother, who had refused to give her a badge to get through the apartment block’s front door, after her sister had given her a key to her flat.
The probe showed she had conducted searches online into witchcraft days before the murder.
Benkired, whose trial is to last until next Friday, faces a maximum sentence of life in jail.
When asked by the judge what they expected from the trial, Lola’s family said they wanted justice and for the truth to be revealed.
Lola’s brother Thibault Daviet said, referencing his late father: ‘I would like to speak on behalf of the whole family… and of course my father, who is unfortunately no longer here because of the same person.
‘We would like you to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, to all of France and to us’.
Benkired, speaking to the girl’s mourning family, today said in court: ‘I would like to ask the whole family for forgiveness. What I did was horrible and I regret it’.
Conservative and far-right politicians seized on the case to call for better immigration law enforcement, after Benkired was found to have overstayed a student visa and failed to comply with a notice to leave France.
But the victim’s mother urged politicians to stop exploiting her daughter’s death.
