BOBIGNY:
A 33-year-old French man who admitted killing his wife and their four children claimed he “heard voices” telling him to “cause harm”, a prosecutor said Thursday.
French police on Tuesday arrested a man with a history of psychiatric illness on suspicion of murdering his Haitian-born wife and their nine-month-old children, aged four, seven and 10.
Their bodies were found on Monday, Christmas Day, at the house in the Mo east of Paris.
The man, a plumber, has been receiving treatment since 2017 for depression and psychotic behavior.
Meaux prosecutor Jean-Baptiste Bladier, citing Wednesday’s autopsy results, said the 35-year-old mother of the children and her 10- and seven-year-old daughters had received “approximately 10 stab wounds each” which had been “inflicted with great violence ».
The four-year-old and nine-month-old boys “died of suffocation after drowning,” he added.
The suspect was scheduled to appear before an investigator on Thursday. The prosecutor requested that he be taken into custody.
The suspect said he “couldn’t identify the trigger for his act,” the prosecutor said. He has “felt nothing” and “feels empty” after his family was killed, the prosecutor added.
According to Bladier, the suspect “indicated that he had been taking his medication daily” since 2019, but had not taken it on December 24.
Also read: Four children and their mother were murdered on Christmas Day in France
Police discovered the bodies in a ground-floor apartment in a working-class district of Meaux around 9pm on Monday.
Neighbors told police they had heard screams downstairs on the night of December 24-25, adding that they had seen traces of blood.
An investigation has been launched into the murder of minors under 15 and murder by a partner.
The man was arrested in 2019 after he stabbed his partner in the shoulder blade when she was pregnant with their third child and then tried to kill himself. He had declined to press charges.
The man was arrested near his father’s house in the neighboring town of Sevran.
“He loved his children, he loved his wife,” the suspect’s father, who had alerted police to his son’s presence after he refused to answer the door, told RMC.
“Maybe what he did there was unconscious, that he didn’t know what he was doing,” he said.
“I haven’t figured it out yet.”
The suspect’s sister was more candid, saying she helped him grow up.
Read: One dead, two injured as man attacks tourists near Paris’ Eiffel Tower
“There is no one I loved more than my brother, from birth to the age of four,” she told RMC.
She blamed him despite his condition.
“Whoever tells me he’s crazy, I don’t give a damn, I blame him,” he said.
He described his murdered wife Beatrice as “the strong woman, the fighter, a real lioness”.
The couple, who have been together for 14 years and married since October 2023, met in high school.
“She was always there for him, standing up for him. He couldn’t have found a better wife,” the sister said.
“She was the one who managed my brother’s medication, his medical appointments, his paperwork.”
The Paris region has recently experienced a series of infanticides.
In November, a 41-year-old man confessed to killing his three daughters, aged four to 11.
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