Moroccan Mother on Trial for Alleged Murder of Disabled Daughters Missing Since 2016

Naïma Bel Allam, a former Moroccan accountant, is accused of aggravated voluntary manslaughter. According to the Specialized Institute of Education for the Multiply Disabled (Isep) of Tonneins (Lot-et-Garonne), which had welcomed them during the day, her two daughters aged 12 and 13, born with malformations, have been missing since December 7, 2016. Five months later, the Children and Family Directorate of the departmental council had reported their disappearance, reports Le Parisien.

The MRE will be arrested, placed in custody, prosecuted for "abandonment of minors" and incarcerated in September 2017. Her indictment will be changed to "aggravated voluntary manslaughter" in January 2018. The investigators had just discovered a "brownish" stain at the home in Nérac. The searches carried out for a week in February 2022 by about thirty soldiers, gendarmes and divers from the gendarmerie in a wooded area a few kilometers from the family home were not fruitful. Naïma will be released in November 2021, but she has not completely cleared herself.

The divergent versions given to the investigators about her daughters bring this mother, abandoned by her husband, before the courts. She claimed to have entrusted her daughters to a Moroccan couple at a motorway service area in Spain. A version contradicted by the investigators. "She has been claiming her innocence for seven years. She has been saying from the beginning that she did not kill her daughters and that they are safe," says her lawyer Sophie Grolleau. She will add: "She deliberately blurs the tracks, she wants to protect them from the French institutions in which she has completely lost confidence."

The father of the two teenagers wants to see his daughters who have been missing since 2016. He then joined the civil party. "If there was the slightest proof of life, my client would be the happiest in the world," declared his lawyer Sylvie Brussiau. "This proof of life, we don’t have it, even seven years after the start of the investigation. He no longer believes in it and what he would like is to give a dignified burial to his daughters who have disappeared." The Assizes Court of Lot-et-Garonne will deliver its verdict on Thursday.