Daughter’s Heartbreaking Testimony in Trial of Moroccan Mother’s Murder

A moment of intense emotion on Thursday, October 10 at the Assizes of Seine-Saint-Denis. At the stand, Anissa*, Bouchra’s daughter, who is calling for her mother. "I want to see my mom again," the 17-year-old girl laments, before collapsing. She cried to the point of moving the audience. She recounts her family life, then the violence exerted by the accused on his partner, until her savage murder at the bottom of her building on November 26, 2021. "We were a normal family, there were joyful moments. But some have a weird connotation. For example, my father used to make us scratch his lottery tickets. He has already stolen our money to buy some," the teenager recounts.

As a child, Anissa was unaware of her father’s cannabis addiction: "I could smell the joints, but for me it was a habit. The knives and katanas that were in the house, we also found that normal." Her mother managed to conceal the domestic violence she was suffering: "She used to take us out of the apartment or send us to our room with the headphones on." In 2021, as the situation was getting worse and worse, her father Khalid F. was playing the victim: "He’s an outstanding actor. He would cry telling us that my mother was chasing him out of the house. I wondered why she was so mean, and then one day, she told me about the violence she was suffering."

In June 2021, Bouchra filed a complaint against her husband for domestic violence. The following month, he received six months in prison for domestic violence, trespassing and death threats. The judge had also banned Khalid from approaching Bouchra, who had been suffering verbal and physical abuse from her ex-partner since 2019. To protect the victim, justice had given her a smartphone with an emergency button to alert the emergency services in case of aggression. A relief for the mother of the family. "My mother was more at peace. Usually she suffered from migraines, and there she had nothing," Anissa recalls. But it was a temporary lull. Khalid was released in early October after two months in prison at Fleury-Mérogis. On his release, he went to his ex-partner’s home.

"At that time, I was alone with my sister. He had a very special way of ringing the doorbell, and I immediately knew it was him. I moved the door, and he understood that there was someone inside. He finally left," the 17-year-old recounts. He goes back to his ex-partner’s place and runs into her. The 40-year-old woman had in the meantime activated the alert on her phone, which led to the arrest and detention of her ex-husband. While he was supposed to be released in December, he was released on November 26, without his family being informed. His ex-wife was far from knowing that her ex-partner had been released from prison. Khalid goes to her place. "At the time of the events, Anissa is at home with her sister. She is on the phone with her mother, who is arriving at the bottom of the building. That’s when Khalid F. appears," reports Le Parisien.

"She started screaming my name. I thought they were kidnapping her, or that my father had sent someone to kill her," Anissa recounts. She hangs up the call and tries to call the police, but fails. She gets out of the apartment and starts screaming with all her might. A neighbor opened her door. I entrusted my sister to her and called the police again." In the aftermath, her father stabbed her mother more than 30 times. The latter succumbed to her injuries. "I was with the police and I was looking at my phone. That’s when I saw that a friend had shared a press article about a woman who had been killed, with a picture of my building. The police took my phone from me. I collapsed." The 54-year-old man had planned the murder of his ex-partner since prison. "He said he was going to kill his wife as soon as he got out of prison. He talked about it every day for a month," a former cellmate confided to the court on Wednesday.

Awaiting the judgment that will be handed down on this Friday, October 11, 2024, Anissa lives in fear. "Just talking about him, I get ch