The assassination of a girl by the hand of a supposed rapist indignates France and provokes a state crisis

ParisMore than 6,000 people participated on Sunday in a silent march in Florence, a municipality of just over 6,000 inhabitants located near Toulouse (Occitania). It is the town where Lyhanna, an 11-year-old girl, lived with her parents and brother. The police found her dead last Thursday, allegedly murdered by the father of one of her best friends, a 41-year-old man. The family had reported her missing three days earlier.

The girl's body was hidden inside an agricultural tank 18 kilometers from where she disappeared after leaving school. The autopsy results, which will not be known for a few days, will have to determine if she also suffered sexual assault. The sentiment among those present at the march, mostly friends and neighbors of the family, was one of anger and consternation.

The case has outraged France and opened a sharp confrontation between the government and the judiciary, because the murder could have been avoided if the prosecution and the police had acted quickly: the man accused of the crime – and arrested the same day the girl disappeared – had been reported in August 2025 for the rape of another girl, then 10 years old, also a friend of his daughter. Almost ten months after filing the report, the police and the prosecution had only interviewed the victim and her mother, but they never managed to arrest or question the suspect. The expert who interviewed the girl concluded that her account was coherent.

The inaction is, at this point, inexplicable. "It is incomprehensible that nine months later [after the report was filed] no one has been arrested," stated the Minister of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, this Tuesday during a hearing in the Senate.

Threat to the victim

There are other details of the case that have increased public anger and reveal the lack of sensitivity with which the family of the girl who reported the rape in 2025 was treated. Her mother, for example, has explained to the French press that upon seeing that the man remained free, she called the police station every Monday to see if the case was progressing. Until an officer told her that if she continued calling, they would report her for harassment.

This was not the first complaint against the suspect: the man had been accused in 2024 of another rape, but the case had been dismissed due to lack of evidence. In 2021, he was also fired from a school where he worked as a janitor for "inappropriate behavior towards a student." Without ever being arrested, the man – married and father of two daughters – lived a normal life.

However, Lyhanna's family had broken off relations with the suspect months earlier, after an incident at the man's house: at a sleepover, the detainee behaved suspiciously with Lyhanna, whom he touched inappropriately, doing to her what she described to her parents as "tickling." The man has denied kidnapping and murdering the girl and has only admitted to driving her to the municipal pool.

How could the suspect's profile, with his entire judicial background, have been overlooked by the investigators of the 2025 rape? Why were they not arrested or interrogated? "It is clear that there has been a malfunction [...], and it is unacceptable," said French President Emmanuel Macron. The Minister of Justice described the case as a "terrible failure of state action" and admitted to "extremely serious" errors. The government has also opened an investigation to determine what went wrong and why the alerts that allowed the suspect in the rape of the 10-year-old girl in 2025 to remain at large were ignored.

Clash with the government

While the opposition parties call for the resignation of the Minister of Justice, the words of political leaders have caused a clash between the government and the Public Prosecutor's Office. Associations and unions of prosecutors and judges have denounced a structural problem of lack of resources, but Gérald Darmanan has denied that the problem is a lack of means: "Neither a new law nor more resources" could have prevented Lyhanna's death, the minister assured.

The public prosecutors, on the other hand, maintain that more investment is needed in tools that allow them to work more quickly and in modernizing systems. "Nowadays, prosecutors who have to process a case cannot consult on their screen a global view of all previous convictions or all information related to a suspect," lamented the president of the national conference of public prosecutors of France, Christophe Barret, in statements to France Info.

The head of Justice has asked the public prosecutors to review from now until July 14 the 70,000 complaints that have not yet been investigated in which the victims are minors. "There is an absolute urgency," Darmanin insisted.

This Monday evening, more than 60,000 people gathered in front of courthouses in different cities of the country to express their indignation at the dysfunctions of justice that have allowed the accused to remain free and to have allegedly murdered Lyhanna. In Paris, the demonstration took place in front of the Ministry of Justice.