The 12-year-old boy kidnapped Friday evening by his father in the Pas-de-Calais, and for whom the “kidnapping alert” plan had been triggered this Saturday morning, was found safe and sound, AFP learned from ‘a source close to the case. Little Hamza was found around 10 a.m. at his father’s sister’s house in Sallaumines, near Lens, this source explained. His father, who had been described as a “potentially dangerous man, was taken into police custody.
End of Kidnapping Alert
The child was found in good health.
The photos should therefore no longer be distributed.
Thanks everyone.– Ministry of Justice (@justice_gouv) December 18, 2021
A kidnapping alert was triggered on Saturday morning by the Interior Ministry to find “Hamza, boy, 12 years old, 1.50 m, mat complexion, brown with black eyes, dressed in gray pajamas, a blue sweater and a black coat “, removed from Fouquières-lès-Lens on Friday evening. The child had been placed with a maternal assistant as part of the separation from his parents, by decision of a children’s judge on Tuesday, the Béthune prosecutor’s office and a police source said.
Several police sources had claimed that the boy had been kidnapped “without any violence”, as the nursery assistant confirmed to the press on Saturday. “It happened very, very quickly I didn’t have time to do anything,” she said, adding that the kidnapper was not “aggressive” and had ” not say a word “.
The authorities feared that the father, Halim B., would seek to leave the country with his child. According to the prosecution, he had been “intercepted at the airport” a few weeks ago “when he was preparing to flee outside the European Union, despite a measure prohibiting him from taking his son abroad”. This 40-year-old man, 1.73 m, 110 kg and with a shaved head, was presented by the prosecution as “determined in his project and potentially dangerous”. The investigation was entrusted to the Lille judicial police.
“I couldn’t do anything”
In Fouquières-lès-Lens, the nursery assistant told the press that she had welcomed little Hamza around 6 p.m. Friday evening. She describes “a child very sorry for his placement and very withdrawn into himself”. “There was a knock on my door, so I opened my door a crack. And there was a gentleman I didn’t know at all, and the kid pulled the door open and ran away,” she explained. , in front of his home, a two-story apartment in orange briquettes, near the city center.
“I don’t know if it’s the dad, I don’t know him … He was a gentleman”, she detailed, saying to herself “astonished” that he got his address. “I could not do anything, I did not even see the registration of the car I did not see anything”, continued this woman of about fifty years. The “Abduction Alert” plan is a massive and immediate alert system deployed to assist in the search for a suspected abducted child. It is largely inspired by the “Amber Alert” plan, created in Texas in 1996, after the kidnapping and murder of little Amber Hagerman.
Adopted in France in February 2006, it consists of mobilizing the population in the search for the child and his abductor. The device has already been triggered more than 25 times in the country. The last use of this device dates back to last July for the kidnapping of little Dewi, an 8-year-old boy kidnapped by his father in Lannion (Côtes-d’Armor). He was found safe and sound the next day, about fifteen km away. The father has since been sentenced to a six-month suspended prison sentence.