“Acts of extreme violence”: the causes of Célya’s death revealed

The death of the 6-year-old girl, abducted on Friday evening by her mother’s partner and found dead shortly followingwards, is linked to a “major fracture to the back of the child’s skull”, prosecutor Frédéric Teillet said on Saturday.

“The medical examiner (…) was able to carry out an external examination which revealed facts of extreme violence, a major fracture of the child’s skull at the back of the head which very probably caused his death,” declared Mr. Teillet, during a press conference, a few hours following the arrest of the 42-year-old suspect.

After a child abduction alert was triggered on Friday evening, a local resident reported the presence of the suspect’s vehicle near a wood where the girl’s body was found.

At around 6 a.m., the suspect, who had been in a relationship with Célya’s mother for regarding two years, was arrested “a few hundred meters away”, “still armed with a knife” but the man “allowed himself to be arrested without incident”, added the prosecutor.

On Friday evening, the forty-year-old took cocaine several times during the day and, according to the mother’s account reported by Mr. Teillet, attacked the little girl for an unexplained reason.

“It was like a fit of madness,” according to the mother, who was interviewed in the morning at the hospital by investigators and who herself was stabbed and has “nine wounds” on her body.

Currently in police custody, the 42-year-old man has been convicted five times for drug-related offences and has already been incarcerated, the magistrate said. However, he was not known for any acts of violence and no complaints of domestic violence or violence once morest the girl had been filed.