Guillaume Dominguez with AFP
modified to
7:09 p.m., March 04, 2023
Three months after the disappearance at the end of November of Leslie Hoorelbeke and Kevin Trompat in Deux-Sèvres, the gendarmes found two bodies in Charente-Maritime, not far from the home of a suspect indicted for assassinations, we learned. Saturday from a source close to the investigation. A first body was discovered Friday afternoon in Puyravault, the town of origin of this suspect, and the second Saturday in a neighboring hamlet, Les Haies, which depends on the town of Virson, it was also specified. source. A forensic doctor made external findings on Saturday, AFP journalists noted, but the two bodies will be autopsied early next week in Pontoise, in the Paris region, at the National Gendarmerie Criminal Research Institute (IRCGN ), whose experts participated in the research, we learned from another source close to the investigation.
Leslie Hoorelbeke, 22, and Kevin Trompat, 21, have not given any sign of life since the night of November 25 to 26 in Prahecq, a town of 2,000 inhabitants near Niort. A dog belonging to the young woman also vanished. On Saturday, the operations were concentrated in a grove, surrounded by fields where a dozen gendarmerie cars were parked, AFP journalists found in Virson. Friday afternoon, around thirty gendarmes had searched a field in Puyravault, where they “stayed very late in the evening”, according to residents interviewed Saturday morning by AFP. It was in this town that belongings belonging to the couple were found in a clothing recycling container on December 8.
The search area was delimited thanks to the elements collected during the hearings of the three men placed in police custody this week in this case, according to a source familiar with the matter. The indications were precise enough that the investigators did not need to use construction machinery or dogs to find the bodies.
clothes container
Thursday, a first man, Tom Trouillet, 22, was indicted for “kidnapping and forcible confinement”, and placed in pre-trial detention, according to the Poitiers prosecutor’s office. Common friend of Leslie and Kevin, he was to host them in his house in Prahecq, the night of their disappearance. On January 5, during a search to find them, he told reporters that he had seen them “around 5:30 p.m.” on the day of their disappearance before leaving for “a techno evening”. The record of the young man’s telephone communications, however, showed that he had returned to see his friends in the village during the evening and that he had exchanged messages with Leslie Hoorelbeke until late at night.
On Friday, a second man, Nathan Badji, was indicted for “assassinations”, “modifying the inventory of a crime to obstruct the manifestation of the truth” and “kidnapping and forcible confinement”, wrote the public prosecutor of Poitiers, Cyril Lacombe. According to Le Courrier de l’Ouest, the telephone of this man, also 22 years old, had “limited” to the same places and at the same times as that of Tom Trouillet, the night of the disappearance.
“More hope”
Her parents’ house, located 300 m from the clothes recycling container, was raided and her truck seized. A third man, placed in police custody on Thursday, must be presented to an investigating judge in Poitiers this Saturday, after leaving the Niort gendarmerie at the end of the morning, noted an AFP journalist. From a source close to the investigation, the disappearance of the couple could be partly linked to drug trafficking involving some of the protagonists of the case.
The families of the disappeared had immediately ruled out the hypothesis of a voluntary disappearance. During the January 5 search, Kevin Trompat’s mother-in-law told reporters that he “had almost 10,000 euros on him” on the evening of his disappearance, a sum she had brought to him in Prahecq, according to her. “to buy a car”.
On Saturday, the new lawyer for the father and stepmother of the missing girl, Me Mourad Battikh, said they were “collapsed” and “in shock” after the indictment for murder announced Friday evening which leaves “no more hope of finding Leslie alive”.