17.10.2025
An Algerian woman has apologised for her “horrible” actions Friday as she went on trial accused of raping and murdering a 12-year-old girl in Paris.
Dahbia Benkired, now aged 27, was detained after Lola Daviet went missing in the northeast of the French capital three years ago. The girl’s body was then found in a trunk in the lobby of the building where her father and mother worked as caretakers.
On Friday, the girl’s family sat in court, wearing white T-shirts with a picture of a smiling child and the words: “You were the sun of our life, you will be the star of our nights.”
“I am waiting for justice to be done,” said Lola’s mother Delphine Daviet.
One woman in her fifties broke down in tears when the defendant entered the dock.
“I apologise to the whole family,” Benkired said in a monotone. “It’s horrible what I did. I regret it.”
Although experts who evaluated Benkired’s mental health noted her “manipulative behaviour” they said she did not suffer from any “major psychiatric disorder”.
The court heard how Benkired raped and hit the schoolgirl with scissors and a box cutter, then bound her up in duct tape, including around her face, leading to her death by asphyxia.
She placed the body in a trunk and exited the building, pausing outside a cafe, where she told a client who suspected something strange in her luggage that she was “selling a kidney”, investigators said.
She then convinced a friend to drive her and the bags to his home, before taking a taxi with the trunk back to the building where her sister lived. She fled when she saw police deployed in the area, but was arrested the next day.
Benkired described growing up in a dysfunctional family, a childhood spent between Algeria and France, unloving aunts and a violent father.
She mentioned sexual abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of a neighbour when she was 14, or “men who came to her aunts’ house” in Algeria.
She settled in France in 2013 but had no stable job or residence.
Encouraged by her drug dealer boyfriend, she turned to prostitution and smoked cannabis.
“Twenty joints a day, it made me feel good,” she said. AFP
