French Police Arrest Suspect in Murder of Wife and Four Children
French police have arrested a 33-year-old man suspected of murdering his wife and four children after their bodies were found in a flat in Meaux, 40km (25 miles) northeast of Paris. The victims are a woman and her four children aged between nine months and 10 years old.
According to Prosecutor Jean-Baptiste Bladier, the scene was described as a site of “extreme violence” with pools of blood in the flat, which showed no sign of a break-in. The children’s father was not present at the time. The alarm was raised after a neighbor tried to reach the family several times, and upon noticing that the shutters were down, called the police after finding blood on the door handle and in front of the door.
The suspect was eventually arrested at his father’s home in nearby Sevran, and is known to the police due to a previous case of domestic violence, although he had no criminal record. In 2019, a month before the birth of the couple’s third child, the suspect attacked his partner with a knife, according to the prosecutor.
The Versailles judicial police service is currently investigating the murders, as the suspect was found by following CCTV footage. Mr Bladier stated that the mother and her two eldest daughters had suffered “a large number of stab wounds,” while the two youngest children had been “strangled or possibly drowned.”
Neighbors have described the mother as “nice and spoke to everybody,” and one woman said that the father had been calm but “not comfortable in his skin.” The wife had spoken of her husband’s depression following the loss of his job, and that the suspect had been “undergoing treatment.”
Following the attack in 2019, the mother did not press charges, and documents found during the search of the apartment suggest admission to a psychiatric hospital in 2017 and a prescription for tranquilizers.
The Paris region has recently seen a series of infanticides, and in late November, a 41-year-old man confessed to killing his three daughters, while in October, a policeman killed his three daughters before killing himself at his home in Vemars in Val-d’Oise.