A 69-year-old Algerian man in the suburbs of Paris faces trial after he allegedly stabbed his 15-year-old son to death in 2015 and kept the boy’s corpse in his apartment for 18 months.
Mohieddine D. is accused of stabbing his 15-year-old son at the end of 2015 but the corpse, which was hidden beneath a carpet and covered in blankets, was not discovered until June of 2017.
The body was only discovered due to the fact the 69-year-old stopped paying rent on time and was being subjected to eviction. A police officer, accompanied by a bailiff and a locksmith, entered the apartment on June 6th and found the 69-year-old had stabbed himself, Le Parisien reports.
They also noted an unbearable smell in the apartment, located in Neuilly-sur-Seine, and when the police officer checked the hallway of the apartment he found the corpse of the teen lying on his stomach with his curly hair still visible.
The father was later taken to a local hospital and investigators proceeded to charge him with the murder after conducting an investigation.
The 69-year-old, however, denies the murder and said that his son fell on a knife while jumping on the bed prior to the school holidays in December of 2015. He also claimed the teen tried to blackmail him threatening self-harm because he did not want to spend the holidays in their native Algeria.
In the last 20 years, the French homicide rate has nearly doubled, with 2020 alone seeing a total of 4,472 cases.
French criminologist Alain Bauer compared the rise in murders to the United States saying, “While we are rightly moved by the crisis of mass murders and violence that is returning to the United States, a similar movement that is not very visible, but more and more pronounced, is affecting France.”
Bauer added that many experts expected that the murder rate would decline after the mass-casualty Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice in 2015 and 2016 but were shocked when the number kept rising.