Police have discovered the dismembered remains of a murdered 13-year-old boy along with alleged “Satanic” objects in a villa in the commune of Tarascon in southern France.
Police fatally shot the main suspect, a 32-year-old man, as he was fleeing the villa. The man was said to have had a history of psychiatric problems and violence.
Officers had discovered the teen’s body on Sunday as they searched for the boy who had been reported as having run away from home.
Inside the villa, which was uninhabited, officers discovered a sack of remains containing pieces of the 13-year-old’s body. Investigators said the victim’s head was found in a bucket and part of the corpse appeared to have been “half-eaten”, Il Giornale reports.
According to the French newspaper Liberation, “Satanic objects” were also found at the scene. Locals described the main suspect as a man of “extraordinary violence” who had come into conflict with people regularly in a local bar.
“He scared me. He had a dark look. It was darkness personified. He had no job or known friend. He was a loner,” a local shopkeeper told the newspaper.
The 32-year-old is said to have been arrested on July 9th after throwing Molotov cocktails into the street and had been released just one day before the disappearance of the 13-year-old.
A doctor who carried out an initial psychiatric evaluation for the suspect had claimed he could not be rehabilitated, but a reassessment carried out by other doctors claimed the first report as “alarmist” and said there was no reason to keep the 32-year-old hospitalised.
The case comes just a month after a 17-year-old in the Paris no-go suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis was kidnapped and tortured after allegedly reporting local drug dealers to the police.
Case of cannibalism in France in recent years are not unheard of either, with three African men arrested in 2018 for allegedly attacking a man and attempting to bite off part of his face and eat it.
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