Woman gets rare whole-life sentence for murder of French schoolgirl Lola Daviet
A woman who raped and murdered 12-year-old Lola Daviet in Paris has been sentenced to a rare life sentence in a case that shocked France.
Dahbia Benkired, 27, must be sentenced to at least 30 years in prison after a panel of judges and a jury decided to impose the harshest sentence possible in the country.
Life imprisonment is extremely rare in France, and Benkired is the first woman to receive this sentence.
Those sentenced include serial killer and rapist Michel Fourniret and jihadist Salah Abdeslam, who participated in the Paris attacks that killed 130 people in 2015.
Warning: This story contains distressing details
Lola was killed in October 2022. His body was found in a plastic storage box in the courtyard of the building where he lived in northeast Paris.
Benkired is an Algerian immigrant who has been ordered to leave the country. French right-wing and far-right politicians took up the cause.
Lola’s mother, Delphine Daviet, and her brother, Thibault, applied to the court to hear the decision. His father, Johan Daviet, died in 2024 at the age of 49.
The prosecutor at the hearing argued that Benkired should receive the longest sentence possible. Benkired was examined by psychiatric experts and was found to have “psychopathic” traits but was otherwise sane.
The prosecutor told a panel of three judges and six jurors: “Make no mistake, no amount of medication could fundamentally change Ms. Benkired’s personality. When there is no disease, there is no cure.”
Before jurors began their deliberations on Friday, Benkired told the court: “I ask for forgiveness and what I have done is terrible.
“That’s all I have to say.”
CCTV footage from the afternoon of October 14, 2022, shows Benkired, then 24, approaching Lola after returning home from school.
According to reports, Benkired convinced Lola to rent an apartment in the building that her sister was renting.
Benkired sexually assaulted the 12-year-old boy for more than an hour and a half, then attacked him with scissors and a box cutter.
Benkired bound Lola with duct tape, including around her head, which led to her death by suffocation.
Reading the verdict, the presiding judge referred to the “extreme cruelty of criminal acts”, which he described as “real torture”.
“In determining the appropriate sentence, the court took into account the indescribable psychological damage suffered by the victim and his family in such severe and almost indescribable circumstances,” he said.
