France’s new interior minister said on Wednesday there will be repercussions following the arrest in Switzerland of a Moroccan man suspected of killing a 19-year-old university student and leaving her body in a forest, The Guardian reports.
The alleged attacker was a 22-year-old man of Moroccan nationality. Prosecutors said the suspect had a previous conviction for rape and had been ordered to leave France.
The murder of the student, who authorities have labelled as Philippine, is expected to further heighten political tensions in France, where the new government plans to crack down hard on immigration. Bruno Retailleau, who has vowed to strengthen law and order, tighten immigration laws and make it easier to deport foreigners convicted of crimes, said:
This is an abominable crime. It is up to us, as public leaders, to refuse to accept the inevitable and to develop our legal arsenal, to protect the French. If we have to change the rules, let’s change them.
On Saturday, the student’s body was found in a park in the Bois de Boulogne forest in western Paris, not far from the Université Paris-Dauphine, where Philippine was studying.
A Moroccan national was arrested in the Swiss canton of Geneva on Tuesday and identified as a suspect in the Paris murder, a Swiss justice ministry spokeswoman told AFP. She also added:
The Federal Office of Justice then ordered detention for extradition purposes on the basis of an arrest request from France.
The student was last seen at the university on Friday. Witnesses reported seeing a man with a pickaxe, a police source said.
According to prosecutors, the man was convicted in 2021 for a rape committed in 2019 when he was a minor. He was released in June after serving his sentence and then placed in an administrative detention centre, the source said.
In early September, a judge released him on condition that he report regularly to the authorities. But shortly before the murder of the student, the suspect was put on the wanted list because he had violated the conditions of his release.
