A man has been arrested on suspicion of murder after his wife and their four young children were found dead at their home in a northeastern Paris suburb on Christmas Day, reports The Times.
The 35-year-old Haitian-born mother and her two daughters were “stabbed repeatedly” in a frenzied attack, Jean-Bapiste Bladier, the local prosecutor, said. “It was a crime scene of very great violence,” he added.
The couple’s two sons, aged four and nine months, may have been suffocated, he said, as their bodies showed no apparent injuries.
Police found the bodies in a flat in a working-class neighbourhood of Meaux, a suburb not known to be one of the city’s troubled banlieues, after being alerted by worried relatives. The case is being treated as “premeditated murder”, the prosecutor said.
The suspect, aged 33, was traced using m CCTV footage and his mobile phone signal. He was arrested outside his father’s home in Sevran, a nearby suburb. His name has not been made public.
He has been undergoing treatment for mental health problems since 2017 and was sectioned in 2019 after attacking his wife with a knife six weeks before she gave birth to their first son.
She required medical treatment but declined to press charges. A psychiatrist said he had not been responsible for his actions and the case was dropped after he was discharged from hospital a few months later.