French justice fails in the murder of Tanja Pozgaj

Tanja Pozgaj should be alive today enjoying life with her 18-month-old son Ibrahima.

Instead she's dead, murdered by her former partner, Mahamadou Doucoure, a man she had reported to the police and local authorities on several occasions as being violent and threatening.

Her family wants to understand why nobody seemed to listen to her pleas.

The justice minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, has launched an inquiry into want went wrong and how a system so tragically failed to protect a woman who had sought help.

Because given the facts that have emerged since Pozgaj's body was found, there's surely no doubt that there was a failure within the system.

The fate of the 26-year-old first made the headlines here in France on Tuesday, when she was found stabbed to death at the apartment she shared with Ibrahima, her 18-month-old son, in the town of Fontenay-sous-Bois in the eastern suburbs of Paris.

Ibrahima was missing, and for only the ninth time since it was introduced in 2006, an alerte enlèvement (the equivalent of an Amber alert) was launched nationwide to find him.



Police suspected that he had been taken by his father and Pozgaj's former partner, Doucoure.

The public was warned not to intervene but to report any sightings or pass on any information they had as to the whereabouts of the 28-year-old Doucoure, as he was considered dangerous and possibly armed.

Ibrahima was found safe and sound late on Tuesday evening, Doucoure taken into custody where he later admitted to having killed Pozgaj, and the alert lifted.

So a successful conclusion to the alerte enlèvement, but of course not really as far as Pozgaj's family was concerned, who insisted that her death could have been prevented - if only the authorities had listened and acted.

"My sister filed numerous complaints, and it was only after the 20th or 30th time that they took her seriously," her brother, Sacha said on Thursday.

"With everything they knew, why didn't they protect her?"

Last October Pozgaj went to see Jean-François Voguet, the mayor of Fontenay-sous-Bois.

The 26-year-old was armed with documents and testimonies of complaints she had already made to the police "proving" that she had been repeatedly threatened by her former partner.

What she wanted was to be "rehoused in another town" within the same (administrative) département of Val-de Marne in which Fontenay-sous-Bois is located

Voguet reportedly took her case seriously and a month later wrote a letter a month later to the Prefecture of the département urging that Pozgaj's request be dealt with immediately for both her sake and that of her son, and attaching all the legal documents.

He never received a reply.

It's surely hard to argue against members of Pozgaj's family or their lawyers when they accuse the judicial system of having failed in its duty to protect the 26-year-old.

Just last week Pozgaj returned to see Voguet to repeat her request to be rehoused.

Even though Doucoure had recently received a four-month suspended sentence and a court order preventing him from seeing or approaching Pozgaj, and in fact wasn't even supposed to enter the same département, he was still sending her threatening text messages.

"For six months Tania systematically went to the police to report the threats she was receiving," Yasmina Mechoucha Robin, a lawyer for the family said.

"The most recent one quite simply said 'I am going to kill you'.