Exactly 33 years ago, the martyred body of a young girl was discovered in a ditch of the A10 motorway near Blois (Loir-et-Cher). "The little stranger of the A10" would remain a total enigma for nearly 31 years, until her identification and then the arrest of her parents in June 2018. They then accuse each other, are indicted for "murder and usual violence against a 15-year-old minor, concealment of a corpse ”, then imprisoned.
Inass's father, Ahmed T., who claims his innocence, was released from prison at age 66 in June 2019. "The mother is the only cause of the facts", then noted his lawyer, Me Frank Berton. According to our information, Halima E., 66, who admitted mistreatment of her daughter, was released on June 12 and placed under electronic surveillance. Solicited, his lawyer, Me Antoine Vey, did not wish to speak. The ex-spouses are awaiting their probable trial today, free under judicial supervision.
Carried out for two years, the various hearings of the parents of Inass - presumed innocent - and of his two sisters and four brothers - all civil parties - make it possible to retrace this terrible night of August 1987 and the three decades of secrecy and silence which followed.
August 10, 1987. A rather cool summer night. Ahmed should be packing to take his family to Morocco. The departure is scheduled in a few hours. The road is long and tiring. But in the streets of Puteaux (Hauts-de-Seine), it is towards the police station that he goes.
A few minutes ago, on his way home, this father of 3 daughters found the youngest, Inass, dead, lying on a sofa. His wife told him that their 4-year-old had fallen down the stairs from his bedroom to the bathroom. But very quickly, Inass's two older sisters, aged 8 and 6, would have confided in her: it was their mother who pushed Inass up the stairs "saying that she did not know how to go down on her own. in the toilet ".
Ahmed might be flabbergasted by his daughters' confession. But for months he has known. He knows the violence that little Inass has undergone since arriving in France in 1985. He saw the blows, the traces of deep bites, and one evening when he came home from work, this burn mark from an iron on the back of his girl. “An accident, says his wife, the little one fell on it. "
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The father therefore knows, but he says nothing. He never said anything. “Out of fear,” he apologizes. Afraid of his wife. Unpredictable and violent. Above all and almost exclusively with Inass. " I can not do anything. I cannot denounce her. I am afraid for the children. I'm afraid of losing them. Ahmed, on his way to the police station, rehashes his sentences. He changes his mind. Turn around, and come back to the apartment. The heavy doors of secrecy have just closed on an entire family. They will remain sealed for more than three decades.
DNA gives it a name
The next day, at 3.20 p.m., in Suèvres (Loir-et-Cher), at kilometer point 135, in a ditch of the A10, motorway employees discover the lifeless body of a girl wrapped in a blanket . She died of a hemorrhage. His death would go back at least six hours before his discovery. The child is dressed in a bloody panties, undershirt and dressing gown. It's Inass. But at this moment no one knows. The girl with black curly hair, swollen face, dark skin is a stranger. It is "The little girl of the A10". A child at the heart of a frozen family secret, buried as one hides a cursed treasure.
Until the "magic" of DNA gave a name and lineage to the "little martyr of the A10". A young man involved in a case of violence has his DNA taken in 2017. This genetic profile is compared with a trace discovered in 1987 on the girl's shroud cover. Expertise conclusions: this young man is one of the four boys of the T. family and the brother of the “girl from the A10”. The gendarmes who had stumbled over this mystery for so long learned his first name: Inass.
The child is no longer a repressed memory or an anonymous grave covered with white gravel in a small cemetery in Loir-et-Cher. Before the ditch of the highway, the burial under X of a small coffin carried by a rural policeman and a mayor moved to tears by this stranger stranded at the gates of their village, there is a complex family history that the instruction still in progress gradually unveils.
A painful story
Halima, the mother, arrived in France in 1982. She is 28 years old and comes from Morocco, from a wealthy family. There she was a teacher. When she joined her husband in Vitry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne) in the Paris suburbs, the couple already had two daughters aged 4 and 1. Soon, Halima becomes pregnant again. She wants to give birth in Morocco. It was therefore in Casablanca that Inass was born on July 3, 1983. The girl was brought up there for a year and a half by her grandparents.
In France, the couple of Ahmed and Halima are struggling. He believes that his wife has suffered from mental disorders since arriving in France, but that she refuses to be treated. She does not feel well in this adopted country and regrets having given up her job as a teacher in Morocco. However, the family has just grown with the birth of a fourth child. A boy. The first. Inass returned to France at this time.
Her father, who has hardly ever seen her, finds her rather thin. And quickly he would have noticed that his wife "hit" her, "mistreated" her. New short stay in Morocco and the family settles in Puteaux where Ahmed has just opened a business. According to his statements, he then proposed to his wife to leave Inass in Morocco "to avoid mistreatment" but she would have refused, still according to him. "It is from there that the ordeal began", will tell the father in custody, declaring to be "very afraid" of a wife who has already hit him, and even once with a basic bat- ball.
“She was still crying, she was throwing up, she didn't want to eat. She was not well. And I did not understand, ”decrypts Halima for his part, facing the examining magistrate in November 2018.“ When I type her, I become another person, I do not recognize myself, ”explains the mother of Inass, during a confrontation with her ex-husband in May 2019.
The truth, finally
Because, after having maintained in police custody that Inass still lived in the south of Morocco, where she was married and mother of 3 children, her mother had come out of denial before the judge in June 2018. She then admits that she has hit her daughter, "but not that much", evoking slaps when she had "fits". Halima also accuses Ahmed of "hitting everyone and not just Inass", speaking of domestic violence, especially when she wanted to ask for help from an association to solve her relationship problems with Inass.
These accusations, her former husband denies them, evoking for his part pressures and the "black magic" of certain members of her in-laws. Between 1984 and 1987, the couple nevertheless had three other boys. Seven children in total. Including a battered child.
It is indeed a scientific certainty: Inass suffered serious mistreatment. On August 11, 1987, in the ditch of the A10 motorway, then a few hours later on the autopsy table, the forensic pathologists observed these sometimes old lesions: burns, deep bites in the chest and cheeks, "violence". usual and old ”, the experts concluded at the time.
Who was his executioner? The father has always denied having raised his hand on Inass. The mother downplayed the extent of the beatings. Confronted with the findings of the legal experts, Halima swore during an interrogation on February 14, 2020 that she did not "remember the rest", while repeating "me my children I love them". Among these children, it remains to be seen what the first two of the couple saw.
A night that rises to the surface
Auditioned 31 years after the incident, the older sister, who was almost 9 at the time, remembers a father who was often absent due to work and a non-violent mother, but whose abrupt changes in behavior made necessary psychological follow-up for ten years. Inass? She says she has no memory of another sister.
Heard again in May 2019, the eldest 41 years old today evokes this time Inass, "a little girl who did not speak much" with whom she played when the family lived in Vitry-sur-Seine. She describes her mother as a woman "suffering from everything", "often in crisis", tearing clothes or shaking her children and giving the impression moments later that nothing had happened. The eldest child remembers seeing her mother bite Inass several times during her fits.
In June 2019, a dental expert's report confirmed that the youngest had been bitten by an adult, without being able to say with certainty that it was her mother but categorically rejecting the hypothesis of the father.
During this same hearing, the eldest, who seems to be freeing herself from a heavy burden, also delivers a chilling account of her little sister's last evening, August 10, 1987 in the apartment in Puteaux. “There was an atmosphere […] there was a drama […] there were tears, cries of my mother, of my father […] there was something heavy,” she recalls. .
In these distant and buried images, there is also his little sister Inass. She saw her "at the bottom of the stairs […] she was moving more". She knew she was dead, not knowing if it was accidental or criminal. Inass down the stairs? A scenario of his daughters invented by their father to send him to prison, will defend the mother before the judge in February 2020.
And there is this “rush” and “quick” departure late at night. The whole family who rides in the golden beige Citroën BX. There is his father, his mother who carries Inass, his other sister and his three brothers, the youngest of whom is less than two weeks old. The older sister remembers Inass who “didn't move, wrapped in something, in her mother's arms”. Faced with the judge in 2018, Halima nevertheless maintains that Inass was still living while riding in the BX. It was later during the trip that she said she noticed that she was breathing less and less: “she said mom and after she no longer spoke, she breathed no longer. "
Then comes this stop on the edge of the highway. The older sister well remembers a stop sign. Without knowing where. Then she fell asleep and woke up in Morocco. Ahmed swears that it was Halima who deposited the body. His ex-wife claims the opposite. In any case, nobody will see "the little sister not very talkative" again. The following ? A very long silence.
A torn family
The eldest keeps the memory of her parents “who were there without being there”. No one is talking about Inass's death. Heard by the judge in June 2018, Halima admits that she has never discussed the facts with her children, except for her eldest daughter to whom she made to swear not to speak about it. For the latter, the "drama" was approached throughout these years only by allusions to her other sister.
She was only 6 years old during that tragic night in the summer of 87. Heard in May 2019, she confirms the statements of her big sister: Inass died while her father was out. On the other hand, she does not keep any memory of the circumstances of the death, nor of the trip on the highway. The youngest evokes the brutalities of her mother. Slaps, kicks or sticks, but no bites. She further explains in a letter her feelings about her family life at the time: "an overlapping violence, bogged down, mixed with an unconditional, violent and exhausting love […] it was what we call madness, to be mad" .
These facts, brought to the surface thanks to psychotherapy, she explains that she spoke about it with her father a year or two earlier. "But my dad, he's not been talking for a long time… He's completely dead inside," she confides. As if by closing the door of the Puteaux apartment that night in August 1987, then placing the body of one of theirs on the side of a highway, a whole family had plunged into another life. Between silences, unspoken and resentment.
When Ahmed was arrested in June 2018, he had been divorced from Halima for 7 years and lived with one of his daughters. To the gendarmes who had come to arrest him, he reportedly declared: “I've been waiting for your arrival for 31 years. "