A woman who raped and murdered 12 year-old Lola Daviet in Paris has been handed a rare whole-life sentence in a case that has shocked France.
Dahbia Benkired, aged 27, must spend at least 30 years in prison after a panel of judges and a jury decided to impose the country’s harshest possible penalty.
A whole-life term is extremely rare in France and Benkired is the first woman to receive it.
Those who have been given the sentence include serial killer and rapist Michel Fourniret and jihadist Salah Abdeslam, who took part in the 2015 Paris attacks which killed 130 people.
Warning: This story contains distressing details
Lola was murdered in October 2022. Her body was discovered in a plastic storage box in the courtyard of the building where she lived in north-eastern Paris.
Benkired is an Algerian immigrant who was under orders to leave the country. French right-wing and far-right politicians have seized on the case.
Lola’s mother Delphine Daviet and her brother Thibault were in court to hear the verdict. Her father Johan Daviet died in 2024, aged 49.
The prosecutor in trial had argued for Benkired to received the longest sentence possible. Benkired was examined by psychiatric experts and found to have “psychopathic” traits but otherwise sane.
The prosecutor told a panel of three judges and six jurors: “Make no mistake no drug treatment can fundamentally transform Ms Benkired’s personality. When there is no illness, there is no treatment.”
Before jurors began their deliberations on Friday, Benkired told the court: “I ask for forgiveness and what I did is horrible.
“That’s all I have to say.”
CCTV footage from the afternoon of 14 October, 2022 showed Benkired, then 24 years-old, approaching Lola after she returned home from school.
According to reports, Benkired lured Lola into an apartment her older sister was sub-letting in the building.
Over an hour-and-a-half, Benkired subjected the 12-year-old to a sexual assault before attacking her with scissors and a box cutter.
Benkired bound Lola with duct tape, including around her head, leading to her death by asphyxiation.
As he read out the verdict, the presiding judge referred to the “extreme cruelty of the criminal acts” which he described as “true torture”.
“In determining the appropriate sentence, the court took into account the unspeakable psychological damage to the victim and her family in such violent and almost unspeakable circumstances,” he said.
Benkired was in France on a student visa but had failed to renew it. In July 2022, she was stopped at an airport in Paris and was given 30 days to leave the country.
Days after Lola’s murder in October that year, Jordan Bardella, president of France’s far-right National Rally party wrote on X that the woman “had no business being in France”.
Hard-right rival Éric Zemmour also took to social media to write: “Lola’s murderer should never have crossed her path.”
France’s Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin criticised the “indecency” of politicians who, he said, “should reflect on the consequences of their words”.
Lola’s mother and father have denounced “any use of the name and image of [our] child for political ends”.
