The defendant was asked to comment on his confession after first admitting last Friday that he had “intentionally” killed the eight-year-old girl after abducting her from a wedding party in August 2017. He assured that if he had always denied so far, it was because he had misunderstood the term “kidnapping”.
However, he maintained that the girl “came up” on her own in her car “to go see (her) dogs”. “I did not remove it voluntarily,” he adds, provoking the impatience of President Valérie Blain, who questions him. – “Madam President, do you not like my answer?”
– “It’s not that I don’t like her, she asks. In a way, she can be sorry too,” she replies. “Are you taking her to kill her?” – “No, not at all, I’m not taking her in my car to kill her”.
“An inexplicable moment”
He repeats at this time seeing again on her the face of Corporal Arthur Noyer whom he killed a few months earlier: “a fear suddenly arises, I want this fear to disappear and stop”. “It’s an inexplicable moment, I freak out, I punch him. (…) When I kick, I intend to kill her, yes”, he explains.
Asked about his feelings at this precise moment, he said to himself “in total incomprehension”: “I don’t even know if it’s day or night, what time it is, where I am”. “I know once again that I am not believed but it is the truth”, he repeats.
‘Lack of empathy’
An expert, Paul Bensussan, believes that the confessions of Nordahl Lelandais had been able to “raise hope for the parents of Maëlys” to one day know the truth about what happened to their daughter and her reversal is the “shining manifestation of her absence of empathy”.
For Me Laurent Boguet, lawyer for Maëlys’ father, Nordahl Lelandais “is able to simulate, to manipulate his interlocutor”. “Luckily experienced psychiatrists thwarted” his attempts to present himself as “a being suffering from a schizophrenic pathology. He tried, it didn’t work,” he said. The verdict is expected Friday.
(The essential / AFP)