“Justice for Shaina” : the trial of a young man accused of having murdered and burned alive in Creil in 2019 the teenager, probably pregnant with him and victim two years earlier of sexual assault, opened behind closed doors on Monday 5 June before the Oise miners’ assize court.
Suspected of having lured Shaïna, 15, into a shed to kill her and burn her body, the accused, 17 at the time, is due to appear until Friday. As he always did, “he contests the facts, screams his innocence”said before the hearing his lawyer, Mr.e Adel Fares, who will plead the acquittal.
Thin, long hair tied in a bun, the accused declined his identity in a calm and youthful voice at the opening of the hearing. “The family and I are determined for the truth to come to light. This truth is associated with the guilt of the accused”for its part affirmed the lawyer of the family of Shaïna, Me Negar Haeri.
At the call of the victim’s older brother, Yasin Hansye, a few dozen people gathered in support of the family in front of the court, carrying banners and placards. “We are here to bring justice to my sister”, said Mr. Hansye. On October 27, 2019, the body of the teenager was discovered almost completely charred by the police, guided by a rumor. Forensic expertise will reveal “multiple wounds” stabbing, but also that she was still breathing when the fire started.
Positive pregnancy test
The day before, she had gone out after a family dinner. In her purse, her relatives find a positive pregnancy test. According to various experts, the teenager, who had undergone an abortion a few months earlier, was most likely starting a new pregnancy. According to the investigation, she attributed paternity to the accused, with whom she had an affair.
Two anonymous calls and then a key testimony quickly directed the investigation towards the young man. One of his friends says he came to see him the night of the incident, and told him that he had made an appointment with Shaïna to kill her. He would have stabbed her fifteen times, and would have been injured by a flashback. This witness provides details known only to investigators. Shaïna refused to have an abortion, he revealed again.
Other elements incriminate the young man: if his phone has disappeared, he multiplies the SMS to Shaïna that day. As the crime approaches, both activate the same terminal, 500 meters from the shed. And the accused’s device was switched off between 9:36 p.m. and 10:13 p.m., the approximate time of the events.
He will explain his burns by a “friction” then a “eczema”, his statements varying on his schedule. He recognizes some sexual relations with Shaïna from August, but claims to have broken up. A fellow prisoner, however, would have heard it “to say proudly” that he had “killed his girlfriend, who was ‘a whore’, whom he had ‘impregnated'”, wanting to prevent his family from finding out. In prison he said “prefer to take thirty years than be the father of a bastard”, said another inmate. The crime could be “a desperate attempt” to preserve its image, in a context of“cultural and religious prohibition” related to sexuality, estimated an expert psychologist.
Victim of sexual assault
Two years earlier, Shaïna had been the victim of sexual assault, for which four other young people from her city were sentenced Thursday on appeal to suspended sentences ranging from six months to two years in prison. For mee Haeri, Shaina’s death “is the culmination of a long ordeal”, triggered by this first case. Abused in a disused clinic where her then boyfriend had taken her, Shaïna had been filmed by her attackers.
Images posted on Snapchat had exposed her, according to the lawyer, to a “growing disparagement”. Shaina was treated “like a thing, with which one sleeps, but which one can remove”she laments.
Me Elise Arfi, another defense lawyer, raised a “excessive media communication on this case”. The number of feminicides increased by 20% in France in 2021 compared to the previous year, with 122 women killed by their spouse or ex-spouse, according to the Ministry of the Interior.