Fury in France as pupil, 19, is murdered in Paris ‘by migrant’
The murder of a French student in an exclusive Paris suburb, allegedly by a Moroccan rapist who had been released from jail and was awaiting deportation, has ignited fury in France.
The body of the 19-year-old woman, named only as Philippine, was found buried in the Bois de Boulogne park in an affluent area in the west of Paris on Saturday.
Philippine was studying economics at Paris-Dauphine university and was last seen a few hundred metres away from campus around midday on Friday.
The suspect, named by French media as Taha O., is a 22-year-old from Morocco who had been due to be expelled from France after serving five years in jail for raping a student in 2019, Le Monde newspaper and BFM TV said.
On June 20, he had reportedly been sent straight from jail to a detention centre for illegal migrants pending his expulsion, but a judge set him free on September 3, as the expulsion process was getting bogged down in administrative delays.
He was supposed to check in regularly with police and stay on at a specific hotel, French media said, but three days after his release, when the paperwork to expel him was completed, Taha O. had disappeared.
The hard-Right National Rally (RN) has seized on Philippine’s murder to push its agenda of toughening immigration laws.
The body of the 19-year-old woman, named only as Philippine (pictured), was found buried in the Bois de Boulogne park in an affluent area in the west of Paris on Saturday
Marine Le Pen’s party has said in past weeks it reserved the right to withdraw its tacit backing for Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s cabinet if its concerns over immigration and other issues were not addressed, saying the fate of the government was in its hands.
‘It’s time for this government to act: our compatriots are angry and will not be content with just words,’ RN chief Jordan Bardella said, accusing the state of being too soft on security and immigration after French media said the suspect was a 22-year-old migrant with a criminal record.
He added: ‘This migrant had no right to be here, but he was able to offend again in total impunity. Our justice is too lenient; our state is dysfunctional. It is time for the government to act.’
‘Philippine’s life was stolen from her by a Moroccan migrant targeted by an OQTF (obligation to leave France),’ he said on social media platform X on Tuesday evening.
Marine Le Pen’s RN party acquired kingmaker status by signalling support for a new coalition between centrists and conservatives, after a July election in which President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist government suffered heavy losses.
On Wednesday morning, new Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said: ‘If we need to change the rules, let’s change them.’
‘Faced with such a tragedy, preceded by many others, we cannot just condemn it or be outraged,’ Retailleau said in a statement. ‘It’s up to us, public officials, to […] update our legislation, to protect the French.’
Retailleau, from the conservative Republicans party, had already signalled earlier this week that France was likely to see much tougher immigration and security measures.
The park where her body was found, the Bois de Boulogne, has long been a hot spot for prostitution, with locals saying that parts of it have become ‘increasingly frightening’ due to drug addicts and others (file image of the Bois de Boulogne)
Geneva Police officers and Railway Police officers are seen at an the entrance to Geneva Cornavin train station, in Geneva, on September 24, 2024 as Taha O. was arrested in the city
Greens lawmaker Sandrine Rousseau warned against the far-Right using the murder to ‘spread its racist hatred’, while also calling for the ‘femicide’ to be ‘punished severely’.
France deports more non-EU citizens than any other European Union nation, official Eurostat data shows.
Philippine disappeared while on her way home to her parents’ house in western Paris. Her colleagues have described her as a quiet, model student to local media
But it issues so many expulsion orders – two to five times more than Germany in each quarter over the past two years – that its ratio of enforced expulsion orders is low at less than 10 per cent.
In the first quarter of 2024, France ordered the expulsion of 34,190 non-EU citizens, or nearly a third of all expulsions ordered across the EU. It expelled 4,205 people in the same period.
Bureaucracy, diplomatic rows and a reluctance by some countries to accept the return of people holding criminal convictions are among the reasons why far fewer expulsions than are ordered are actually enforced.
Philippine disappeared while on her way home to her parents’ house in western Paris. Her colleagues have described her as a quiet, model student to local media.
Her alleged killer Taha O. was tracked down and arrested in Geneva on Tuesday and is due to be returned to France.
The park where her body was found, the Bois de Boulogne, has long been a hot spot for prostitution, with locals saying that parts of it have become ‘increasingly frightening’ due to drug addicts and others, according to the BBC.
