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'.

Mother says Typhaine Taton is dead

A sad ending to the story of the five-year-old girl who "disappeared without trace" in June.

Anne-Sophie Faucheur, the mother of Typhaine Taton, a little girl who went missing in June this year, has admitted that her daughter is dead.

You might remember the case of Typhaine, the five-year-old girl who apparently vanished without trace while walking with her mother in the northern French town of Maubeuge in June.

Her disappearance made the national headlines here in France, with police questioning both Faucheur and her companion, Nicolas Willot as well as Typhaine's father, François Taton, from whom Faucheur was estranged, and searching both their homes and a lake and a river near the town.

But still there was no sign of the five-year-old and no indication of how she had "disappeared" so suddenly in broad daylight.

Faucheur even held a press conference a couple of weeks after her daughter's disappearance saying how she had panicked when she realised Typhaine was nowhere to be found and that she and Willot had questioned local shopkeepers and passers-by in desperation before reporting the girl missing.

On Monday though the 23-year-old was taken into police custody again and in the course of questioning apparently admitted that her daughter was dead.

It's still unclear as to whether Typhaine was the victim of abuse by Faucheur's companion, Willot, as some reports on national radio have suggested, or died accidentally with the couple trying to cover up exactly what had happened.

Both Faucheur and Willot are in police custody, and the search for Typhaine's body has been widened to include other towns in northern France and across the border in Belgium.

The tale of the family that never went missing

The mystery of a mother and her two children who "disappeared" last week has been solved.

They have turned up in the south of France where they had apparently been on holiday "taking a break" from the rest of the world.

The 45-year-old mother and her two children, aged, 14 and 15, were first reported missing last weekend.

They had been on holiday in the mountains in a village near le Grand-Bornand in the Haute-Savoie in southeastern France.

The alert was first raised by the estranged husband and father of the two teenagers on Saturday, reportedly concerned that he had heard nothing from his family.

When police went to investigate the apartment in which the three of them had been staying, they found it empty and the car missing.

An official inquiry was launched and the story quickly became the focus of media attention with speculation throwing up possibilities of a suicide, an accident or an attempt by the mother to flee the country with the children: speculation perhaps fuelled to a large extent by the authorities saying that no line of inquiry had been ruled out and that the mother "was known to be someone with depressive tendencies."

And so the story quickly gathered momentum of its own, with no sign of life and no clue as to their whereabouts.

Until Monday that is, when an employee at a camping site over 100 kilometres away in the south of France confirmed having seen the three "missing" family members, and records of cash withdrawals in the area surfaced.

On Thursday came the official confirmation that the investigation had been closed and an interview with the mother on national radio where she gave her version of events and expressed her astonishment at how much had seemingly been made of so little.

The 45-year-old said she was surprised that she and her two teenage children had been at the centre of a nationwide search as all they had been trying to do was to take a break "without listening to the news and without being able to be contacted".

"We weren't aware of anything and one day in the car I thought that perhaps we should listen to the news on the radio as it had been quite a while since we had tuned in," she said.

"I was very surprised that there was a report on me and I was a little bewildered. I immediately called my brother."

Her main concern, she insisted, had been to give her children a proper break and she didn't really understand why her family, and in particular her estranged husband, had overreacted.

"I was a little fed up having to ask him constantly to get in touch with his two children, and so I just decided to cut ourselves off from anyone being able to get in touch," she said.

"They (the children) wanted to see the sea and I wanted him to make an effort to try to get in touch with them, but I never wanted the whole thing to take on the proportions it has."

So a happy ending to a story, which in the words of the national daily, Le Figaro, in reality turned out to be "Much ado about nothing"...and perhaps a reminder to us all not to jump to conclusions until the story has been told.

What has happened to little Typhaine

It has now been a week since five-year-old Typhaine Taton disappeared without trace while walking with her mother in broad daylight in the northern French town of Maubeuge - and there's still no sign of her.

Everyone surely remembers the case of Madeleine McCann, the British girl who disappeared in May 2007, a couple of days short of her fourth birthday, while on holiday with her parents in Portugal.

It was a story that made the world headlines for many months, and her whereabouts is still unknown.

Here in France there has also been a case of a little girl disappearing without any explanation, and the circumstances are just as extraordinary.

It's a story that has received national coverage but as French investigators have apparently had so little information to go on - just the statement of the mother - they still seem to be at as much of a loss as to what could have happened to the girl as they were last week when the local public prosecutor, Bernard Beffy, told reporters that they had no idea as to Typhaine's whereabouts.

"We don't know whether she's alive or dead and at the same time no hypothesis has been ruled out."

A week ago five-year-old Typhaine disappeared without trace while walking with her mother in the northern French town of Maubeuge.

According to Anne-Sophie Faucheur, the two of them were in the town centre last Thursday afternoon, her daughter roughly 50 metres ahead of her.

Typhaine turned the corner at the intersection of two roads and by the time Faucheur arrived her daughter was nowhere to be seen. She had "disappeared within the space of five seconds" was what she told police.

Faucheur, who finally broke her week-long silence at a news conference on Wednesday, told reporters that at first she had been convinced that Typhaine couldn't be very far.

"I looked around and then I started to panic," she said. And rather than ask passers-by or shopkeepers whether they had seen her daughter, she rang her partner, Nicolas Willot, who joined her in the town centre and together they went to the local police station to report Typhaine's disappearance.

Police opened an investigation and during the past week they have detained and questioned both Faucheur and Willot, later releasing them. Forensic and technical teams have searched the home the couple share with Typhaine and her two sisters.

The father of the five-year-old, François Taton, from whom Faucheur is estranged, has been questioned, as has his mother.

Pictures of the girl have been distributed, divers have searched the nearby river Sambre and a lake, sniffer dogs have been used, and pictures of the girl have been distributed.

And still there's apparently no clue as to what happened to Typhaine or where she could be.

Of course there are other details that have slowly made their way into the media and given rise to the inevitable conjecture.

Faucheur and Taton didn't have any sort of formal legal agreement as to who should have custody of the Typhaine and her older sister, Caroline.

Until January the five-year-old had been living with her father and attending a nearby primary school, but then reportedly Faucheur decided that Typhaine should come and live with her. Since then she has not been enrolled in any school.

Then there's the non-appearance of the Typhaine at the baptism of her one-year-old half-sister (the daughter of Faucheur and Willot) on June 13, with Faucheur claiming that she left had left her daughter alone at the home!

Such speculation that there is more to the fate of the five-year-old than simply having "disappeared within the space of five seconds" led Faucheur to hold Wednesday's news conference, where she once again repeated what she told the police and journalists before: her daughter had disappeared while the two of them were in the centre of Maubeuge.

"We feel completely powerless. There's an emptiness " she said.

"We don't know anything apart from the fact that we miss her and we are certain she will be found."

Girl in custody battle back in France with father

This is a follow-up to a piece that first appeared here last month.

You might remember the story of Elise, the three-and-a-half-year-old girl who was abducted in the southern French city of Arles on March 20.

Her father, Jean-Michel André, was left badly beaten, an alerte de l'enlèvement (the equivalent of an amber alert) raised and French police put out a nation-wide search, which was later extended throughout the whole of Europe for the girl and her Russian-born mother, Irina Belenkaya

On Sunday Elise was found safe and sound in Hungary, close to the border with the Ukraine.

Police there detained the mother and Elise was reunited with her father on Monday, with Victor Gioia, the lawyer for André confirming that his client had flown to Hungary to collect his daughter and said that the goal now was "to try to avoid yet another trauma in the girl's life."

Elise has been abducted three times since the couple split in 2007.

"The father's intention was not to start another battle with the girl's mother, but to find a solution that would allow their daughter to have a more-or-less normal life," Gioia told French media.

He also added that his client would not be pressing charges against Belenkaya who is due to appear before a court in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, on Wednesday.

And on Tuesday afternoon André and Elise arrived back in France.

While the story seems to have had a happy end - at least as far as the father and French law are concerned - it still leaves a lot of issues unresolved.

The case remains particularly complex because both parents have been awarded individual custody of Elise by courts in their respective countries.

Similarly both are liable to prosecution for abduction in one another's countries; Belenkaya in France and André in Russia.

According to the national daily, Le Figaro, the French authorities will be getting in touch with their Russian counterparts in the coming days to "try to find a solution for the family that is in the best interests of the child."

For its part Russia says although it judged Elise's return to her father to have been "premature" it has proposed to France that the two countries try to co-operate to find a solution to the dispute between not just the two parents but also the two countries' legal differences.

"We have a case which is very complicated from the judicial perspective," said Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday.

"That's why we want to propose to France that experts from both sides undertake a concrete consultation process."

France on alert for young girl abducted in custody battle

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There's still no sign of a young girl abducted on Friday afternoon in the southern French city of Arles.

Police launched an amber alert after the three-and-a-half-year-old Elise was snatched on her way home from school with her father.

And over the weekend that hunt was extended Europe-wide and in particular to neighbouring Switzerland after there were reports of a sighting of a girl matching her description at Geneva airport.

Those reports later turned out to be false.

Elise has been at the centre of an international battle for custody between her parents since the couple split three years ago, and already in her short life has been abducted three times.

Her father, Jean-Michel André, is French and her mother, Irina Belenkaya, is Russian.

Both parents have been given custody over their daughter by their respective countries and that has played a large part in the fact that Elise - and remember she is only three-and-a-half years old - has already been abducted three times in her short life.

When the couple split three years ago, a French court gave André custody of their daughter.

But just one month later she was kidnapped by Belenkaya and taken to Moscow.

An international arrest warrant was issued for the mother at the time but Russia refused to comply or even acknowledge it, and instead gave Belenkaya custody over her daughter.

So a stalemate was reached, with French courts having given André custody while as far as Russia was concerned Belenkaya was completely within her rights.

In September 2008 André flew to Moscow to find his daughter and for the second time she was abducted, although without any violence according to André.

Again the two countries' legal systems differed as to the rights of the parents.

As far as France was concerned, André had acted within his legal rights to bring Elise back to this country, while the authorities in Moscow said had had breached Russian custody law.

On Friday Elise was abducted for the third time.

Her father was left battered and bruised, and said afterwards in interviews that his daughter had been taken by two men "dressed as security" guards and a woman "wearing a wig".

For André it was clear that not only was Belenkaya behind this most recent abduction, she was also the woman "wearing a wig" and France has reissued an international warrant for her arrest.

If, as suspected, Elise is either on her way back to Moscow with her mother or is already there, André says he would once again try to retrieve her, even though there's an arrest warrant out for him in Russia.

"Of course I would go back to Russia, and of course I'll look for her. She's my daughter," he said.

"When I last went there to find her, I did it for her (well-being).

" Her mother had made me 'disappear' from her (Elise's) life. She didn't remember me any longer.

"I'm not frightened. I won't stop."

France - Xavier Fortin, a free man

Here's the follow-up to a story that made the headlines here in France a couple of months ago.

Back in 1998 Xavier Fortin "disappeared" with his two sons (aged six and seven at the time) rather than return them to their mother.

At the end of January, Fortin was taken into police custody and charged with having removed minors from their mother (who had custody) after he and his two sons were "discovered" in the village of Masset in the département of l'Ariège in the southwest of France.

On Tuesday he appeared in court and was handed down a two year sentence, of which 22 months were suspended.

As he has spent the past two months in police custody, Fortin is now effectively a free man.

During yesterday's hearing, Fortin told the told the court that he had "chosen a life on the run" because he had thought it was in the best interests of his sons at the time.

He was convinced that had he returned them to their mother they would have been subjected to "complete brainwashing".

A week after their father was arrested the boys , Théo and Manu (they changed their names during their years "on the run" from Okwari and Shahi Yena) now 17 and 18 respectively, began a series of media interviews in which they repeatedly declared their support for their father, and expressed the desire for him to be released as soon as possible.

(You can read the previous story here.)

And indeed they were both in court yesterday to attending the hearing.

While the prosecution had been seeking a minimum of six months behind bars for the 52-year-old, Fortin's lawyer, Pascaline Saint-Arroman, said before the verdict was announced that she hoped the court would a little more understanding.

"The father is a victim, the mother is a victim and the two children are victims," she told reporters.

"And that needs to be taken into account when the court takes its decision."

The boys' mother, Catherine Martin wasn't present yesterday and according to her lawyer, Renaud Arlabosse, wasn't looking for revenge or disputing her former husband's abilities as a father.

"The only thing she has asked for is compensation to the amount €1 - a symbol," he said.

"What Catherine hopes is finally to have the time to be able to rebuild a relationship with her two sons. She has to rediscover how to become a mother because she has had that right taken away from her for nearly 12 years now."

On Tuesday evening Fortin was released.

And the reaction of his two sons?

"There is no winner and no loser in all of this," is how Shahi Yena responded after the verdict was announced.

"For me it's a huge step for French justice in terms of actually listening to what the children had to say."

Missing sisters found safe and sound

The mystery of the "disappearance" of two girls who went missing 11 days ago in the northeastern French town of Rheims is over.

On Thursday 11 year-old Sophie and her 13-year-old sister Valérie turned up at school. Their father and three other people, were taken in for police questioning suspected of having kept the girls hidden.

As reported here, the girls had been at the centre of a custody battle between their mother, Katia Navigante and their father, Rénaldo Gualtieri.

They were last seen on Monday October 6, when they reportedly left their father's apartment to go to school, leaving behind them a message saying they would rather die than return with the mother to Italy, where she lives.

Navigante had been given custody by Italian authorities of the two girls after the couple split - a decision that had been upheld recently by a court in France.

The sisters went "missing" the day before their mother arrived to collect them.

Now it seems that the father was behind the charade to keep the girls hidden, although when news broke that they had turned up at school, he was still maintaining his innocence in the whole affair.

He told French television that he was relieved they were safe and sound and perhaps the suspicions that he had anything to do with their disappearance would now be dropped. But shortly afterwards police took him in for questioning along with his brother and two of his friends.

They girls turned up at school on Thursday morning looking as though nothing had happened, their principal, Dany Alary, told national radio. "It was 8.10 am and they looked like two girls who were just a little late for class - that's all."

The police were immediately informed and the sisters questioned as to their whereabouts during the past 11 days.

Although of course it was good news that the girls had been found safe and sound, Navigante's lawyer, Sylvie Dumont-Dacremont, told reporters the welfare of the children had always been paramount and they had also been unwilling to implicate their father in their "disappearance" for fear that he would be sent to prison.

She also urged the authorities to "take all measures necessary to keep them safe until their mother arrived."

For almost two weeks the police remained convinced that the father was behind the "fake disappearance" of the two girls and a half hour before they turned up at school had launched an investigation of more than 15 houses of friends and family of the father of the two girls, the public prosecutor of Rheims, told a press conference.

"It seems that this has all been organised by the father," she said. "It's unacceptable to play such a game with the police and judicial authorities for such a period of time

Gualtieri's father, Guiseppe, refused to believe that his son is guilty.

"I know my son. I know he's innocent," he told reporters. "He would never have hidden his children."

In spite of that Gualtieri and his accomplices are likely to be charged and if found guilty, could face a maximum of three years in prison.

On Friday morning the girls' mother arrived in France to collect her daughters.

Concern grows over missing girls' disappearance

When 11 year-old Sophie and her 13-year-old sister Valérie, left their father's house in Rheims in northeastern France on Monday morning, he apparently thought they were going off to school.

But they haven't been seen since and instead, a message they left behind saying they would rather take their own lives than be forced to return to their mother, has led police to launch a search for them.

The sisters are at the centre of a custody battle between the mother, who lives in Italy and the father, who lives in France.

The accusations made by both parents are contradictory and confusing, with the only fact certain in the case being that the two girls have not been seen or heard from for nearly five days and neither parent apparently knows of their whereabouts.

The girls were born in Italy and when their parents separated in 2004, it was the mother, Katia Navigante who was given custody of them and their older sister (now 16) by an Italian court.

The father, Rénaldo Gualtieri, says that although he had visitation rights, he wasn't allowed to see his daughters very often and they weren't even permitted to call him.

He maintains the girls were mistreated and threatened by his former wife and her new partner, and that he had a report from Italian social services which confirmed that Navigante put pressure on the two girls to remain quiet.

Gualtieri, said in an interview this week that it had been for the sake of his daughters that he had brought them to France in July 2007 and not as claimed by their mother a case of "abduction."

"It wasn't a kidnapping. It was for their own good because they couldn't put up with the violence and threats by their mother any longer," he said.

The mother though gives a rather different interpretation of what happened. When the girls were taken by their father, she applied to an Italian court to have them returned.

That request was granted and upheld by an appeals court in Rheims. Navigante arrived on Sunday - the day before the girls were due to be handed over - to collect her daughters.

The next day they went missing leaving only the letter behind.

"We prefer to die rather than to return to Italy. Please forgive us."

For Navigante it's clear that her daughters are being hidden somewhere, and she told French television that she didn't believe the girls had "disappeared".

"All of this is a conspiracy, a plot " she said looking at the letters "They didn't write those words of their own free will."

"I have plenty of letters from them and I can tell that these haven't been written with their hearts.

"I think they're being hidden so that they can't return with me.

Navigante's lawyer, Sylvie Dumont-Dacremont, says the children have been put under pressure by their a father they love as much as they fear.

That accusation and the suggestion that he has somehow engineered the disappearance of his daughters has angered and upset Gualtieri.

"I don't know how anyone could say such things," he said. "But in the end, anything can be said as the only thing that matters to me is to find my daughters and be assured of their well being."

Gualtieri offers no explanation as to why the French court upheld the Italian judge's decision to return the two girls to their mother apart from saying that the ruling hadn't been in the best interests of his daughters.

While the police continue their search for the two girls, Navigante has filed an official complaint with the public prosecutor against Gualtieri, accusing him of kidnapping.