“I didn’t know why I hit my daughter”: at the trial of the parents of the unknown woman from A10, the memories and denials of a mother

When Halima El Bakhti gave birth to her third daughter on the morning of July 3, 1983 at the Casablanca polyclinic, she remembered one detail, the very first: “I just saw her little feet, her little fingers.” “Did you like her?” asked the president of the Blois Assize Court on Friday evening. "Of course." But little Inass is left with her maternal grandmother, while Halima El Bakhti returns to France, her two eldest children under her arm, to the two-room apartment in Vitry-sur-Seine where she now lives with her husband and children.

The father, Ahmed Touloub, who appears alongside her, allegedly demanded, according to him, that she not carry around an infant for the grocery store. “I put my head down and went back. Without my other half.” The little girl stayed a little over a year away from her parents, on the other side of the Mediterranean, before Halima El Bakhti came to pick her up the following summer. From this moment on, Inass's days will be numbered.

These first sweet moments of the summer of 1983, when Halima El Bakhti and her daughter were in the family home in Casablanca, are the only happy memories she keeps with her daughter. “Afterwards, it was terrible all the time. It was all black,” she summarizes, frowning, sometimes waving her hand near her head.

This darkness flooded the court for two days, when the photos of her child were projected onto the autopsy table. They are the same little feet, the same little fingers as those at the polyclinic, but the entire body is covered with bites, burns, lesions, bruises. Inass became “the martyr of the A10”, a little girl abandoned along the highway, in Loir-et-Cher, on August 11, 1987. Since Monday, Halima El Bakhti, 72, has been on trial for “acts of torture and barbarity leading to the death without intention of causing it” on her child and Ahmed Touloub, for complicity. His interrogation completed a first…