The investigation starts from scratch.
A 46-year-old man, imprisoned in June for the alleged murder of an unidentified cyclist, has been released, we learned on Tuesday from the Évreux prosecutor.
A call for witnesses had been launched in mid-November to try to elucidate this mysterious murder, which Le Parisien revealed.
In vain: the body of the cyclist, who was allegedly killed in March, has not been found.
“The suspect placed in pre-trial detention was released a few days ago,” public prosecutor Rémi Coutin told AFP, confirming information from Paris-Normandy.
“The released man remains under investigation.
He is placed under judicial supervision with a ban on leaving the national territory and the obligation to check in very regularly with a gendarmerie brigade,” the prosecutor stressed.
The investigations are continuing.
"We relied heavily on the call for witnesses in a very specific case, without a victim's body and without a reported disappearance," said the magistrate.
If testimonies resulting from the call for witnesses were exploited by the gendarmes, unfortunately it did not lead to any concrete element making it possible to find the body of the supposed victim or to identify with certainty a person who would have disappeared.
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In mid-May, a woman went to the Dieppe gendarmerie to denounce a murder committed, according to her, by her ex-companion.
She said that in March, this carpenter of Polish origin from whom she had just separated had called her, "obviously panicked and under the influence of alcohol, to tell her that he had just killed someone" by car.
The driver retracted shortly after, before repeating his remarks.
According to his former companion, he confessed to having loaded the body and the bicycle into his car, registered in Poland, before hiding them and then returning to bury them.
Two diametrically opposed versions
On his return, the cyclist being still alive, "he had finished her off by hitting her several times with a shovel", according to the account reported by the prosecutor during the call for witnesses.
Two witnesses, including the ex-companion, observed traces of shock on the vehicle before it was discovered charred on April 12, and declared stolen by the carpenter on May 10.
Arrested on June 21, the suspect gave during his police custody “two diametrically opposed versions”, according to the prosecutor: first that of “a joke to his ex-partner so that she (…) returns to live with him", before explaining that he had "hit a cyclist well" but "she had recovered and had been able to leave".
He also admitted to having set fire to his vehicle himself.
The man was indicted in June on charges of "murder, concealment of a corpse, destruction of evidence and false denunciations".
But he then denied the facts.
"It's a file that presents weaknesses", summarizes Rémi Coutin.