The Nantes prosecutor's office on Thursday requested the indictment for
"murder"
and the detention of a 44-year-old father, suspected of having pushed his daughter on Tuesday from the Saint-Nazaire bridge.
The forties had been seen pushing his daughter from the Saint-Nazaire bridge on Tuesday afternoon.
The young woman, born in 2004, succumbed to her injuries.
"The father of the victim was presented (Thursday afternoon) to an investigating magistrate of the criminal center of Nantes",
indicated the public prosecutor of Nantes Renaud Gaudeul.
Read alsoA father in police custody after pushing his daughter off the Saint-Nazaire bridge
"The prosecution requested the indictment of the person concerned on the charge of assassination, as well as his placement in detention"
, added the prosecutor, specifying that the decision had not yet been rendered Thursday at the start of the evening.
According to the prosecutor
"the defendant (a 44-year-old man) denied throughout his police custody the intentional nature of his gesture, stating that on the contrary he had tried in vain to prevent his daughter from committing suicide".
“However, during the flagrance investigation, 10 witnesses were heard and described a voluntary gesture on the part of the respondent,”
added Renaud Gaudeul.
Tuesday afternoon, two soldiers from the gendarmerie on leave, who were on the Saint-Nazaire bridge, had seen
"a vehicle stop in front of them from which a man and a young girl were leaving, heading for the railing of the bridge" ,
Saint-Nazaire prosecutor Sylvie Canovas-Lagarde said in a statement on Wednesday.
"They saw the man throwing her into the void
," she added.
The man, born in 1977,
“marked his intention to jump from the bridge, a gesture interrupted by the soldiers”,
according to the same source.
While the investigation made it possible to establish that it was a father and his daughter, the investigations tended
"to establish the circumstances of the passage to the act and to specify the family environment"
, had specified the public prosecutor's office in Saint-Nazaire.
A flagrant investigation of the head of intentional homicide was then entrusted by the prosecution to the brigades of Montoir-de-Bretagne and Saint-Nazaire.
The Saint-Nazaire bridge which spans the Loire estuary culminates at 68 meters above sea level.