The abduction of Maelys de Araujo

[stefano]

Quite an RI story, definite echoes of the Dutroux affair

Maëlys de Araujo: Man held after girl disappears at French wedding

31 August 2017



A man has been detained by French police investigating the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl at a wedding party in the eastern region of Isère early on Sunday, reports say.

The 34-year-old was a wedding guest, the Dauphiné Libéré newspaper quoted a prosecutor as saying.

He had previously given an inconsistent account of his whereabouts.

Maëlys de Araujo was last seen at 03:00 (01:00 GMT) in a children's area at a hall in Pont-de-Beauvoisin.

The detained man had left the wedding "at a time that could correspond to Maëlys's disappearance", Bourgoin-Jallieu posecutor Dietlind Baudoin said in a statement quoted by the Dauphiné Libéré.

The arrest was made following interviews with many of the other wedding guests, Ms Baudoin said.

The man was known to police and his home was being searched, BFMTV reported.

Maëlys had gone to the wedding with her parents and elder sister as well as other members of her family. The DJ raised the alarm when she was reported missing and the 180 guests tried to find her before police were called and a search began.

Local police, search and rescue teams, divers and cavers have been searching the heavily-wooded area but have so far failed to find a trace of her.

Sniffer dogs lost the scent from Maëlys's cuddly toy in a car park outside the wedding venue, AFP reported, suggesting that she could have been taken away by car.

Police have interviewed wedding guests as well as people who were attending two other events nearby.

The search was continuing in driving rain on Thursday but a policeman told French TV that the prospect of finding anything was becoming less and less likely.

There's not all that much else in English about this, but it seems that this suspect, Nordahl Lelandais, got himself invited to the wedding, then acted very inappropriately with the little girl (several of the guests said it was weird how he spent time with her, showing her videos on his phone), then loaded her into his car (where her DNA was found despite a big effort he made to wash the car the next day), then handed her over to someone else and returned to the wedding. He disappeared after the gendarmes arrived, not helping with the search.



He was in the army, and got discharged for drug use. Pretty much the textbook profile of the kind of guy they use for dirty work. A few of his ex-girlfriends have told reporters how scared they were of him. And a weird video has come to light apparently showing his mother with a bundle of €500 notes. Then on Thursday night there was a fire at the gendarmerie in Grenoble, in which some pieces of evidence were destroyed.

He's in police custody, refusing to talk.

[stefano]

Lelandais has confessed and led police to the body, after confronted with a tiny trace of her blood in his car. Now... he is being linked with other disappearances.

Maëlys de Araujo: Remains of missing French girl found

The remains of a nine-year-old girl who disappeared in the French Alps last August have been found, officials say.

Ex-soldier Nordahl Lelandais, 34, admitted killing Maëlys de Araujo "involuntarily", without giving details. Both were guests at a wedding.

He agreed to co-operate with the police after tiny traces of her blood were found in the boot of his Audi car.

The girl went missing in Pont-de-Beauvoisin, north of Grenoble. Her remains were found near the village.

Nordahl Lelandais said he "got rid of the body" and offered his apologies to the girl's parents, said Grenoble prosecutor Jean-Yves Coquillat.

He had previously admitted that Maëlys was in his car on the night she disappeared.

The girl's mother, Jennifer Cleyet Marrel, addressed a bitter Facebook message to Mr Lelandais.

"We had to wait five and a half months for this monster to finally speak... Maëlys will haunt you nights and days in your prison," she wrote in English.

"My little angel, I couldn't protect you from this predator, and this guilt will continue for a long time."

A wedding guest

Maëlys was last seen in the early hours of 27 August in the children's area at the wedding venue.

On Wednesday Mr Lelandais led investigators to an area near his parents' home at Domessin, not far from Pont-de-Beauvoisin.

The search for her remains took police an entire day, involving sniffer dogs working in the mountain snow.

After her disappearance, police questioned all 180 guests, and identified inconsistencies in Mr Lelandais' statements.

He was charged a week later, after police discovered DNA belonging to Maëlys on the dashboard of his car.

Since then, Mr Lelandais has maintained his innocence, claiming that although the girl may have been in his car, that did not prove his guilt.

He was also reported to have spent hours cleaning his car the next day with powerful detergents - something he said he was doing to prepare it for sale.

According to French media reports, Mr Lelandais made a confession in prison on Tuesday, after traces of Maëlys' blood were found in his car.

Still reticent
France's Le Parisien newspaper reports that Mr Lelandais refused to provide details about the girl's death, beyond his insistence it was accidental.

A prosecutor, quoted in the French press, said that after Maëlys' death, her body was taken to a location near Mr Lelandais' home. He apparently returned to the wedding for some time, before later recovering the remains and burying them in the Chartreuse mountains.

The police investigation included mining his computer and phone for information.

Those trawls revealed that, after the disappearance of 23-year-old soldier Arthur Noyer in April 2017, Mr Lelandais searched the internet for "human body decomposition".

Mr Noyer's skull was found by a walker on 7 September in Montmelian, 16km (10 miles) from Chambéry. Mr Lelandais lived with his parents, 30km from Chambéry.

He admitted being in the area where Mr Noyer disappeared but denied any involvement in the killing. He was charged in that case in December.

Mr Lelandais has been questioned about a number of other missing persons in the region.

[stefano]

Now police are looking into Lelandais's possible links to the murder of the Al-Hilli family in 2012. We have a thread on that one here, it smells very strongly like an assassination of Saad Al-Hilli (an Iraqi-born nuclear engineer) and Sylvain Mollier, who worked for a subsidiary of Areva. More and more strange twists to this thing. Though of course the cops might be using Lelandais to tie up a loose end. The two murders happened about 70km apart.

MURDER MYSTERY French ‘serial killer’ suspected of gunning down Brit family in Alps leads cops to body of schoolgirl he admits ‘accidentally’ killing

Nordahl Lelandais, 34, is suspected of being a serial killer as police investigate his involvement in the slaughter of a British family in the Alps in 2012
By Peter Allen in Paris, Guy Birchall and Sofia Petkar
15th February 2018, 12:30 am
Updated: 15th February 2018, 9:50 am

A FORMER soldier suspected of being a serial killer involved in the slaughter of a British family last night admitted "accidentally" killing a girl who vanished during a wedding in France.
...
Lelandais is suspected of being involved in up to 15 unsolved cases, including one involving the British Al-Hilli family, who were killed in the Alps in 2012.
...
Police are already investigating whether Lelandais was behind the deaths of members of the Al-Hillis family in September 2012.

Saad al-Hilli, his wife Iqbal and her mother Suhaila al-Allaf, from Surrey, were shot dead in a forest layby near Annecy along with a French cyclist called Sylvain Mollier.

The murdered couple’s daughter, Zeena al-Hilli, then four, was discovered hiding under her mother's body inside the family’s BMW, eight hours after the shooting.

Her seven-year-old sister Zainab suffered serious head injuries after being pistol-whipped, but survived. Both orphans are now living with family members back in Britain.