The murder of a girl at the hands of an alleged rapist outrages France and provokes a state crisis

ParisMore than 6,000 people participated on Sunday in a white 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, presumably murdered by the father of one of her best friends, a 41-year-old man. The family had reported her disappearance three days prior.

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 more 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 rage and consternation.

The case has outraged France and has opened a harsh confrontation between the government and the judiciary, because the murder could have been avoided if the Prosecutor's Office and the police had acted with speed: the man accused of the crime – and arrested on 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 complaint, the police and the Prosecutor's Office had only interviewed the victim and her mother, but never managed to arrest or interrogate the suspect. The inaction is, at this point, inexplicable.

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 when she saw that the man was still free, she called the police station every Monday to see if the case was progressing. Until an officer told her that if she kept calling, they would report her for harassment.

This was not the first report against the suspect: the man had been accused in 2024 of another rape, but the case had been dismissed for lack of evidence. In 2021, he was also fired from a school where he worked as a cleaner due to "inappropriate behavior towards a student." Never having been 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 home: during 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 all his judicial background, have been overlooked by the investigators of the 2025 rape? Why was he not arrested or interrogated? "It is evident that there has been a malfunction [...], and it is unacceptable," said French President Emmanuel Macron. The Minister of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, described the case this Monday as a "terrible failure of state action" and admitted "extremely serious" errors. The government has also opened an investigation to determine what went wrong and why the warnings that allowed the suspect in the rape of the 10-year-old girl in 2025 to remain free were ignored.

Clash with the government

While opposition parties are calling 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 magistrates have denounced a structural problem, a 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 a global view of all the backgrounds or all the information related to a suspect on their screen," 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," insisted Darmanin.

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