At the Assize Court of Blois,
"How do you explain the torn nipple?
- It’s awful.
- On that, we agree, it’s awful. But who is at the origin of these injuries?
- It was just me, things weren't going well between my daughter and me. »
This Friday afternoon, a thick black veil fell on the Blois criminal court. One of those that we do not prefer to raise because it hides a sticky, cold, unimaginable reality. For the first time since the opening of her trial for “acts of torture and barbarity leading to death without intention of causing it”, Halima El Bakhti, 72, was questioned at length about the ordeal she is suspected of having put her daughter Inass through, whose tortured body was found on August 11, 1987 on the side of the A10. If the septuagenarian wrapped in her beige coat, a white veil framing her face, admitted violence against her 4-year-old daughter, she continued to hide behind lapses of memory as the facts became more and more damning.
“My daughter didn’t recognize me”
To try to understand this tragedy, you have to cross the Mediterranean to Morocco where the family is from. Inass was born there on July 3, 1983. At the helm, his mother remembers this day in the smallest details. The long labor before his birth, his “little fingers” and his “little feet”. Did she like it, asks the president. “Yes, like all my children,” she assures, fiddling with her hands on the bar.
But quickly the reality of his precarious life in France takes over. According to her, her husband, Ahmed Touloub – tried for “complicity” – forced her to leave the infant with her mother while Inass only had ten days to help him work in the family grocery store in Puteaux. “I came home without my daughter, without my other half. » She did not see her again until the following year to bring her back to France. “When I arrived, my daughter didn’t recognize me, I didn’t recognize her either,” she confides on the stand.
She who imagined herself resuming the relationship where she had left it disillusioned. Torn from her grandmother, Inass struggles to acclimatize to her new home, far from Casablanca. “She cries, she doesn’t want me to change her, when I give her food, she vomits, she doesn’t speak, doesn’t want to play,” says the accused in a monotone voice. And to insist: “she is still in her little corner, she does not move. » When did the first shots come? The first slaps? “I don’t remember at all, it was a dark, black, black time,” she swears. These are the only acts of violence she admits to. What about the bites that dotted his body? Some were so deep that they mutilated the child. “The slaps, I remember them. I don't remember the bites. They say the arm was broken, I don’t remember,” she insists on repeating.
“Wounds make you cry”
As the court sinks deeper into the sordid reality of the case, the memory of Halima El Bakhti becomes fleeting. “It’s not just the arm, Madam,” replies the president. There is also the tibia, the leg bone, both elbows, the wrists. » Fractures, some of which dated back several months, never treated. “Wounds make you cry, do you understand that? », Continues the magistrate. " Yes. »
Throughout the interrogation, the accused draws a parallel between her suffering and that of her daughter. Her frustration at not having been able to stay in Morocco to work as a teacher, her isolation in France, her time-consuming work in the family grocery store and this husband with whom she never really got along.
“- I would have liked someone to help my daughter and me.
- What stopped you from doing it [asking for help].
- I had no one.
- School social assistance, your children’s teacher [the older ones were in school]…
- I didn't know.
- You were a teacher in Morocco »
Halima El Bakhti overwhelms her ex-husband, refusing to take sole responsibility for the violence. However, the assessments are clear: it was not he who bit Inass Touloub, the teeth do not match. And his two eldest daughters claim that on the day of the tragedy, he was not present. “If he had intervened, the little one would still be there,” she says.
“Inass, she’s tired, she’s not moving”
Question after question, the president arrives at the day of the tragedy. She swears that she noticed the death of the little girl in the car while the family was going on vacation to Morocco. “I said, ‘Inass, she’s tired, she’s not moving,’” she says. According to him, Ahmed Touloub then stopped on the A10 to check. “He told me she died, it was an earthquake, I didn’t believe him. » According to her, it was he who made the decision to abandon her on the side of the road, highlighting her coldness. If her hearing has not yet taken place, the septuagenarian gave a radically different version during the investigation, affirming that she was already dead, or at least unconscious, when he returned that evening. A story corroborated by his older daughters during the investigation.
“I would have preferred it to be mine instead of him. Life was over,” laments Halima El Bakhti on the stand. His expression is monotonous, his face expressionless. “You talk about yourself, that you would have liked to die, not to be there, but what did she experience? “, scolds the president. “I wasn’t a good mother,” she admits. Does she have happy memories with her daughter? “Yes, in Morocco”, at the time of his birth. That's ten days, in total.
