Martyrdom of the A10: Inass Touloub's mother recognizes "slaps", but remains ambiguous

During the trial, Friday, November 6, Halima El Bakhti admitted to having sometimes hit her daughter, Inass Touloub, but when the president lists the long list of burns, bruises, fractures, bites, she assures that she does not remember them. Sometimes the answers are ambiguous. "How could I do all that? I didn't know why I was hitting her," she said.

The president, however, is surprised by the good memory of the accused. Before being questioned about the facts, she recounted at length the birth of the little girl, her delivery, her desire to stay in Morocco, to return to the position of teacher that she held before her departure for the Paris region, then her husband, who remained in France, who asked her to return without the baby to come back to work with him. “The good times, I remember them well, but not the period which was dark,” proclaims the woman, now 72 years old.

“I loved her, my daughter”

The dark period that she cites several times is the one when Inass, a year later, returned to France after spending his first year of life with his grandmother. The link between Halima El Bakhti and the little girl is not made. “She doesn’t accept me, I don’t accept her, it was very hard for her and me,” she says.

However, she claims to have become attached to this child. She repeatedly calls him “my little one”, “my other half”. “I loved her, my daughter,” she said. “When my little one died, I died too.” For her, Inass's life ended on her knees, in the back seat of the car, the night he left for vacation in Morocco, not the day before in the family home, as Ahmed Touloub, the father, asserts.

“How do you explain the death of your daughter?” asked the president. The response caused astonishment in the assembly. “She was tired, very tired, she wasn’t eating well.” A story far removed from the long agony described again Friday morning by the medical examiner.