After two hours of indictment, the Advocate General Jacques Dallest asked at 11:15 a.m. for criminal life with 22 years of security. Defense pleadings this afternoon. Verdict Friday. In video, Me Fabien Rajon, lawyer for Maëlys’ mother reacts after the requisitions.
“We are, of course, on a sexual motive in this case, unfortunately. Obviously, the motive is sexual”. After his first hour and a half of argument, and while everyone is waiting for the sentence he will ask the Court to pronounce, Attorney General Jacques Dallest lets the suspense build. “But to qualify a criminal offence, the intention and the material act must be combined. We have the intention, but not the physical proof of the act. I have the conviction of a sexual act, but I cannot demonstrate it”.
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Jacques Dallest began at 9:15 a.m. with his words: “We are not asking you to have evidence, but to have an intimate conviction of the accused. Touching the child is the supreme crime, subjecting him to torment is unbearable. Lelandais serial killer? The prosecutor recalls the work of the Ariane cell, set up by the gendarmerie in 2018. She looked at nine hundred and two unsolved files and retained forty-one “interesting” but which could not be attributed to Lelandais. “I would like to say that I do not qualify Nordahl Lelandais as a serial killer, he is not, in my eyes, a serial killer. On the other hand, he is a psychopath”. His sexuality “at the center of the questioning” (…) addictive, overflowing (…) multi-sexual, instinctual”. And to point out, at the time of the facts, the existence of twenty-five concubine mistresses… Pedophilia? The prosecutor came back to these downloaded images, destroyed the day after the wedding, this broken and discarded laptop which perhaps holds the key to the mystery.
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Of the twelve interrogations of Lelandais between 2017 and 2020, he retains that Lelandais is a “permanent liar who only recognizes the elements of the investigation that are put in front of him: it was not Nordahl Lelandais who moved the case forward “And to recall that at the beginning, he will say that he did not speak to Maëlys, then to have spoken to a little girl, a brief contact, then, in front of the DNA on a command from the car, to have just made her get into the car. ‘Audi. “You who love dogs, you made them vomit, with the products used for the intensive washing of your vehicle”.
Nordahl Lelandais has kidnapped and sequestered Maëlys. “Driving in a car with someone kidnapped not by force, but by moral constraint, driving even for a few minutes, is sequestration. The image of the video surveillance of Pont de Beauvoisin, this huddled silhouette, we can clearly see that Maëlys is constrained”. The prosecutor is sorry that we only have Lelandais’ version of what happened. “I wonder about the ease of kicking with your left hand when you’re holding the steering wheel. On this t-shirt that bears no blood. On this bermuda thrown. Does it contain semen? On the position of Maëlys as we found it in the forest: he says that the child was carried in the back on the trunk. Coroners believe she may have been alive. How to explain this fetal position in the forest? Was Maëlys alive? Did it fall back like this on its own? »
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I have the conviction of a sexual act, but I cannot demonstrate it
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Lelandais knew, recalls the prosecutor, that the body, decomposing, would not provide any evidence. “I have the conviction of a sexual act, but I cannot demonstrate it”. He also recalls the words of the ten psychologists and psychiatrists who note “a chilling coldness”, “impulsivity”, “the feeling of omnipotence” and above all “his considerable criminal dangerousness”.
And to conclude: “Nordahl Lelandais is legally in legal recidivism. I ask you to answer yes to all the questions: kidnapping, forcible confinement, murder. A child murderer puts life itself to death. “Addressing the accused:” Nordahl Lelandais, you destroyed a life in April 2017, you destroyed a life in August 2017. You attacked two cousins, sowed despair. You are a destroyer of happiness, a slaughterer of children. The parents of the victims want their images to haunt you for eternity. Well, it’s not eternity that I’m asking for, but a sentence commensurate with the crimes committed.
To the jurors: “You must send him to prison like a great criminal, a great predator. You will do justice to Maëlys, to the cousins of the accused. I therefore ask for life imprisonment with a security period of twenty-two years.
Photo caption: Nordahl Lelandais in the accused’s box on January 31, 2022. Photo and video credit: AFP.
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