Dahbia Benkired, 27, was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of remission or alternative punishment after being found guilty of rape, torture, and barbarity, and the murder of twelve-year-old Lola Daviet . She is the first woman to receive this sentence in France.

The sentence was based on the "extreme cruelty" of the crime, which the court described as "a true torture," and on the defendant's personality, "marked by a chaotic life but which cannot explain this unbridled hatred."

The case of little Lola, whose motive remains unclear, shocked France. The sentence, the heaviest sentence under the penal code, was handed down unanimously. It also includes an unlimited maximum security sentence, which prevents any reduction in sentence or alternative punishment, a possibility that could be considered, under certain conditions, only after 30 years in prison. At the time of the events—October 2022—Dahbia Benkired was living with her sister on a temporary basis in an apartment in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. On October 14, she lured little Lola, the daughter of the building's doormen, into the apartment, forcing and threatening her. The girl was raped, tortured, and then killed, suffocated with duct tape over her mouth .

Benkired then fled aimlessly, dragging with him a suitcase containing the child's body. During the trial, psychiatric experts did not find any real pathology in the defendant, although they did identify a "schizotypal personality, but not strictly speaking schizophrenic," described as "affective coldness, abnormal thoughts, and statements disconnected from reality without being entirely delusional."

The defendant said - experts reported - that she felt "normal" after killing the child, adding that in her opinion "things would have stopped on their own."

The motive for the little girl's murder has never been clarified. The defendant changed her story several times during the trial, speaking of "anger against Lola's mother," the building's caretaker, of a "spell," and then, in the final days before the judges, of a gesture directed at her ex-partner, to "punish" him .

Twenty-four years old at the time of the events, Dahbia Benkired was born in Algiers and had an irregular status in France. Shortly before the assassination, she had received orders to leave French territory.

(Unioneonline)

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