The full, heartbreaking, story of a middle class mother who took her two boys swimming to cool off in the French heatwave – then left them to die in a boiling car when she unpacked the shopping… and ‘forgot about them’

The mother of two teenage brothers found dead in their car during this week’s heatwave in France took them swimming to cool off, then to a supermarket to unpack their groceries before returning home and her family admitted they had forgotten they were in the car.

In a tragedy that sent shockwaves across France, four-year-old Kassim Benouali and his younger brother, two-year-old Sadek, died of heart attacks about ten minutes after they were left in the car.

The children were found unresponsive behind their car parked in direct sunlight on the driveway of their grandmother’s house in the Bois de l’Ubac district of Carpentras in southern France on Monday.

Neighbors heard the screams of their distraught mother, Wafa El Boubkari (33), who found their bodies.

Fatiha, the children’s grandmother, told the Daily Mail: ‘This is a tragedy. It was really hot on Monday. It was a terrible heat wave. My daughter Vefa took the boys to the swimming pool in the morning and then did some shopping.

‘She then went home with the children she left in the car to unload the shopping. ‘May God have mercy on their souls.’

He continued: ‘The media is saying terrible things about my family and trying to make it seem like something suspicious is going on. This was a genuine mistake, nothing illegal happened. ‘Everyone was finding it hard to focus in this heat, they were busy and my daughter was juggling so many other things in her life.’

The children’s funeral took place on Friday amid emotional scenes. Mourners first gathered to pray at the Carpentras Mosque before heading to the local cemetery where the brothers were buried together.

The public swimming pool in Carpentras where Wafa El Boubkari took the children on their last journey

But their heartbroken grandmother’s account of what happened appears to contradict what Ms Boubkari told police investigating the deaths.

She initially claimed that she left them in the backseat of the car after returning from shopping with them and that she later got busy packing the groceries, which caused her to ‘forget’ about the children.

But now he insists that the children got into the back of the car without his knowledge and that the car automatically locked behind them, meaning they couldn’t get out.

He said that he was busy with daily chores at home during this time.

Ms. Boubkari, who has two other children under the age of ten, faces charges of involuntary manslaughter.

If convicted of such a charge, the defendants face a prison sentence of up to 15 years, and in the presence of aggravating factors, up to 20 years in prison.

Another development that further deepened the mystery of what led to the deaths was that friends and family claimed that she had recently separated from her husband and was under great emotional pressure.

She only moved into her mother’s home with her four children about six months ago, after problems arose in her marriage, and she was helped by extended family members to care for her children.

Ms Boubkari’s sister, who did not want to be named, said: ‘We are still trying to understand what happened and this is a very difficult time for all of us. Wafa hasn’t stopped crying, she’s in bad shape, she can barely talk.

‘He’s been going through a lot of personal difficulties, things haven’t been easy for him lately. ‘What happened to his sons is a huge tragedy and we are all doing our best to help him.’

A friend said: ‘Wafa had only been at her mother’s house with her children for a few months. She lived with her husband not far away in Carpentras, but I don’t know if her separation from him was permanent.

‘Who knows? ‘He might be distracted by other things going on in his life.’

His two sons died in the car when the temperature outside was 48C and investigators claimed temperatures inside the vehicle could have reached up to 70C when the air conditioning was not on.

Ms Boubkari first took her children to the local swimming pool, located about three kilometers from her home, to help them cool off as temperatures rose.

They left about an hour later, stopping to buy food at the Grand Frais supermarket before heading home, which took about 15 minutes.

He discovered the children having a heart attack in his white Peugeot around 13:00. Emergency services were unable to resuscitate them and they died in the driveway in front of Ms. Boubkari and other family members.

Entrance of a residential pavilion in Carpentras, southern France

Grand Frais supermarket, where the family stopped after the swimming pool before returning home

Jouvaud Confiseur store front in Carpentras, where Anne Wafa El Boubkar appears to work

A neighbor said: ‘It’s hard to know how this could have happened because from what I could see there was quite a bit of time between her returning home and the children being found.

‘They’re such young kids and even though it’s a pretty big house, how could you not know where they were for so long? We hope the investigation will manage to get to the bottom of all this.’

A preliminary autopsy on Tuesday revealed that the boys died of dehydration due to ‘exposure to extreme heat’.

While Ms Boubkari spent the first part of this week in hospital in shock, her mother and other family members were elsewhere in Carpentras, the five-bedroom house on a cul-de-sac left empty by the tragedy.

Ms. Boubkari worked at La Maison Jounaud, a patisserie in the center of Carpentras that specializes in making handmade chocolate and has branches all over the south of France.

The place, which has been run by the same family for three generations, is one of the best-known patisseries in the region.

One of his colleagues said he had worked there for about five years, serving customers.

He added: ‘We are waiting to speak to Wafa but have expressed our condolences to him and his family. A very nice, hard-working, down-to-earth woman who deals with many things.

‘She was a very good mother and was doing her best. The pain he is going through must be unimaginable and beyond words. Our hearts go out to him, what happened is terrible and tragic.’

The double tragedy occurred as temperatures rose across France and the rest of Western Europe under the influence of a mass of warm air moving northward from the Sahara, fueled by a powerful high-pressure system known as the ‘African anticyclone’.

Meteorologists say the system creates a structure called a “heat dome”, trapping warm air over Western and Central Europe and allowing temperatures to rise day by day.

Another French boy died in similar circumstances in France on Wednesday afternoon after being locked in the family car in Saint-Gratien, north of Paris.

A local police spokesman said the three-year-old boy, whose name was not released, was ‘found by his parents in the car parked outside the house’.

Yesterday, it was revealed that a fourth child in France, this time an 18-month-old baby, died in a car after being forgotten by his parents.

The baby was found unconscious in a car parked at the Aix-Marseille University medical campus on Monday.

On Tuesday, France recorded its warmest day on record at 44.3C, while the average night temperature was around 30C, another record for the country.

During a heatwave in Paris, a couple cools off at the Trocadero Fountain with the Eiffel Tower in the background (file image)

People cooling off at a misty fountain in scorching weather in the French capital (file image)

Due to the intense heat, two of Paris’ landmarks, the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, closed earlier than usual.

A spokesman for the Louvre said the building had ‘not adequately adapted to climate change’.

Nearly 40 people across the country have also been confirmed to have drowned while swimming in unsupervised areas during the unprecedented heatwave.