In Lot-et-Garonne justice will have to disentangle fact from fiction. While acknowledging “lies” during the investigation, a mother accused of having killed her severely disabled young daughters maintained in court on Wednesday that the two young girls, missing since 2016, were “still alive”.
The two teenagers, then aged 12 and 13 and born with malformations, were last seen on December 7, 2016 in the specialized institute of Tonneins, where they were taken care of.
” I have news “
“I maintain, I hammer it loud and clear, they are still alive. I have news,” their mother Naïma Bel Allam told the Agen court, who claims to have not seen them “since March 2017.”
This ex-accountant of Moroccan origin, who appears free for “aggravated intentional homicide”, nevertheless admitted to having changed her version out of distrust of the authorities and fear of placing her daughters “under guardianship”, admitting that there had “truth but also lies”. She notably explained that she had entrusted her daughters to a Moroccan couple at a motorway rest area in Spain, a version denied by investigators.
At the hearing, the fifty-year-old this time claimed to have entrusted them to a “group of friends” whom she met in 2015 in Morocco. “I do not want to give their names so that (these people) are not bothered by the justice system,” she declared, losing her temper when pressed for questions, castigating an “incriminating” instruction.
A “defense mechanism, denial”
An expert psychiatrist described in court a woman with “an unstable and hostile attitude towards the entire process of justice”, suffering from “distress” linked to her family’s opposition to her union with a first cousin. Her husband, who then left her, is a civil party to the trial. This expert evokes, among other hypotheses, that of a woman capable of “convincing herself”. “It’s a defense mechanism, of denial,” she analyzed.
First prosecuted for “abandonment of minors” and incarcerated from September 2017 to November 2021, Naïma Bel Allam saw her indictment reclassified in January 2018, after the discovery of a “brownish” stain at the Nérac home presenting the DNA from one of his daughters. Asked on Wednesday about a deep cleaning, with seven different products, of this stain, the accused replied confusingly: “When I clean, I do it thoroughly”. The verdict is expected this Thursday.