Hundreds Gather to Honor Slain French Teen Sihem Belouahmia Before Burial

A final tribute was paid to Sihem Belouahmia, in her neighborhood of L’Habitarelle, near Alès in the Gard. More than 300 people, her high school friends from the Jean-Baptiste-Dumas establishment in Alès, accompanied by their mothers, her neighborhood friends, all the friends of her family as well, gathered on Rue d’Alger, from where the final-year student left on January 25, reports Le Parisien. She will be buried on Monday in the Muslim section of the cemetery of Salles-sur-Gardon (Gard) in private.

On January 25, Sihem had left her grandmother Fatima’s apartment to join Mahfoud H., 39, whose car she would have been in love with, in the middle of the night. Since then, she had not given any sign of life. The young girl would have, in a communication on the social network Snapchat with one of her acquaintances, specified that if she did not give any news, it was necessary to immediately warn her brothers, reported RTL. After the report of her disappearance, the gendarmes of the Gard had launched an appeal for witnesses to find her. Shortly afterwards, they arrested two people: Mahfoud H. and his ex-partner. The confessions of the almost forty-year-old made it possible to find the lifeless body of the young woman abandoned on the edge of a forest path, Col de la Croix-des-Vents.

"He (Mahfoud) had, in the Gard, a solid reputation as a delinquent for his thefts and burglaries. Strangely, he had never been caught for any possible drug-related activities. He was himself a consumer and we think he was capable of stirring up trouble in the drug trade to recover sometimes the material, sometimes the cash, if necessary by traveling as far as Spain," explains a local mediator. From the Nîmes remand prison, the alleged murderer of Sihem was transferred to the Béziers (Hérault) remand prison for security reasons. The investigators continue the investigations to elucidate this murder.