At the trial of the parents of the A10 martyr, the “demons” of a mother “consumed from within”

“The image of a child so martyred makes it impossible to think. It is unrepresentable. Words have little weight compared to these images that polarize us. There you go, she's a monster, a sick person, a pervert. We don't really want to understand. Whereas the psychiatrist must help the court to think.” Daniel Zagury cannot count the number of times he has gone up to the public benches of a criminal court and then issued this warning: “to enlighten is not to excuse, we are sometimes perceived as a kind of excuser who trivializes the horror. This is obviously absurd.” The psychiatrist began practicing in 1987, the year of the discovery of “the little unknown of the A10” on the side of the motorway, in Loir-et-Cher. Inass Touloub was 4 years old when his tortured body was abandoned by his parents.

During his career, he has examined the greatest criminals, from Michel Fourniret to Salah Abdeslam, and maintains his desire to shed light on human complexity. This Tuesday to his left, the woman prostrate in her chair, her head constantly bowed, Halima El Bakhti, 72, has long remained an enigma. He did not hesitate long when his lawyer, Me Camille Radot, called on him for a private expertise. “It’s a completely extraordinary case which fueled my desire to understand,” he said before the Blois Assize Court on Tuesday. He was not commissioned by the investigating judge during the investigation, but those who were now line up, more or less, behind his analysis concerning the responsibility of the accused at the time of the facts.

“If she was a psychopath or a pervert, we would have stayed away from her”

Navy blue suit, glasses that fall on his nose and some messy hair, Daniel Zagury knows…