They are suspected of having wanted to “sacrifice” their 5-year-old son in the desert: a couple of music teachers, arrested in Spain in 2023, appears on Thursday before the Bordeaux Criminal Court, in the southwest of France, for “association of criminals”.
Justice also criticizes the father and the mother for having failed in their legal obligations as parents.
These two music teachers from Carcans, near Bordeaux, had been arrested on December 21, 2023 by the Guardia Civil – the Spanish gendarmerie – in Algeciras while they were going to embark by car aboard Tangier, Morocco.
The couple had left shackles five days earlier in a 4×4 recently purchased, after having put their sublet apartment.
A few days earlier, the Bordeaux prosecutor’s office had received the report of a loved one who was worried about delusional remarks made by the father. According to the latter, the father said he intended to “sacrifice” the boy in the Sahara because he believed him “possessed”.
Faced with the accusations, the couple, “fusional”, “anti-system” and keen on “mystical beliefs”, proclaims their innocence, according to their lawyers who will have the release.
“He has never intended to harm his son in any way,” says Audrey Boussillon, lawyer for Florian L., who denies having made the same.
“There is no element characterizing the association of criminals”, underlines the council of this man “with very assertive beliefs but belonging to any sect”.
The couple wanted to go “on a trip to Morocco for an indefinite period. They had gone there two years before and had loved a lot, hence the longtime project to come back, “points out Aurélie Filippi-Codaccioni, lawyer for Marie L., placed since parole.
But for the lawyer responsible for the interests of the child, “the mystical words and inexplicable behaviors of the couple” “endangered” in a “certain” psychological and moral security “of their son, victim of” indoctrination “according to doctors.
The little boy thus held at the time of the facts of the irrational remarks, on the importance of “to be cold, fear, to remove the snake which is in us”, according to Merlène Labadie.
“His grandparents (maternal, who have custody) have done a lot of work to manage to deconstruct all these ideas, to what he is no longer afraid of the outside, of others”, underlines the lawyer who will plead “in the sense of a conviction and a certain moral damage for this child”.
