A 19-year-old French woman has been murdered by her 23-year-old Afghan migrant boyfriend, and according to the father, the boyfriend then spoke to him on the phone after the deed, telling him that she was dead and taking responsibility for the murder.
According to police, the young woman, Hélana, was stabbed to death on Nov. 9 in the French city of Ronchin, with her found at her boyfriend’s residence; he has since been arrested.
The father has been interviewed by French newspaper Le Figaro. It reports said that on the day of the murder, David had gone bowling with his daughter and her boyfriend.
[pp id=56373]
“We finished at 6:30 p.m. Hélana then asked me if she could sleep at his place. Everything seemed normal,” David said. Three hours later, around 9:50 p.m., he received a call from Hélana. At the other end of the line there was “a noise, a breath,” described David. Undoubtedly, this was the last breath of his daughter, according to Le Figaro.
David then tried to reach his daughter by phone once again, but she did not answer. Instead, the boyfriend picked up.
“I said to him: ‘Pass me to Hélana.’ He replied: ‘She is dead. I killed your daughter.’ I told him that I was coming, I asked him again for his address, and I left,” testified David, Hélana’s father.
Hélana’s father alerted the police and immediately went to the scene, but it was too late. Hélana had been fatally stabbed several times.
[pp id=46335]
Hélana had been dating the Afghan suspect for about two years. She met him at a private vocational high school, and he was her first boyfriend. He arrived alone in France as a teenager; he learned French, then trained as a plumber and heating engineer before obtaining a permanent contract with a company.
“I met him a good 20 times, especially when he spent the weekend with my daughter at her mother’s house. He even came to Somme for a family meal,” said David, who said that his daughter “loved to laugh, she loved everything, she loved life.”
Hélana was a second-year student at the National School of Architecture and Landscape in Lille. She lived between the homes of her parents, and her father described her as “a bit of a free spirit; she was either with me or with her mother. She had a large office in both homes.”
[pp id=52843]
Her father described her as a “homebody” whose life was largely focused around her studies.
“She never went to nightclubs. When she left school, she went home to do her homework. She saw herself more in landscaping than in architecture,” said David. She had five years left of school.
Hélana’s mother had been deeply moved by the recent murder of 12-year-old Lola, who was raped and had her throat slashed by an Algerian migrant. The mother shared a tribute on Facebook to Lola only to have her own daughter murdered just a month later.
The young Afghan man was first in police custody but has since been hospitalized. The Lille prosecutor’s office has opened a homicide investigation.
The murder of Hélana brings the number of femicides in France to 111 since the beginning of the year.
