Self-confessed child killer jailed for 20 years for beating fellow French soldier to death

A former French soldier who has admitted to killing an eight-year-old girl in a case that shook the country nearly four years ago was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Tuesday for beating a fellow soldier to death just a few months before.

Published: 12 May 2021 09:36 CEST

Self-confessed child killer jailed for 20 years for beating fellow French soldier to death

Nordahl Lelandais (in the baseball cap) is escourted from the court. Photo: Jean-Philippe Ksiasek/AFP

Nordahl Lelandais, 38, had admitted to killing Corporal Arthur Noyer, 23, in the early hours of April 12, 2017, after picking him up as he hitchhiked after leaving a nightclub in the French Alps town of Chambery.

Lelandais has also confessed to killing eight-year-old Maelys de Araujo in August 2017, in a case that horrified France and which is set to go to trial next year.

The prosecution had requested the maximum 30 years in prison for the killing of Noyer, but the court in southwestern Savoie sentenced him to 20 years after finding him guilty on Tuesday.

Lelandais, wearing a white shirt and clasping his hands together, did not react when he heard the verdict, which came after seven hours of deliberation in the high-profile week-long trial.

He has insisted that both deaths were accidental, telling police that Noyer had struck him in a parking lot where they had stopped, prompting a fight that ended when Noyer was knocked out.

Lelandais then put Noyer’s body in the boot of his car.

He then drove around 20 kilometres and dumped the soldier’s body on the side of a road.

During the trial Lelandais offered his “sincere apologies” to the Noyer family, insisting he “never wanted to kill” him.

But prosecutors said the “extreme violence” Lelandais used signalled “the intention to kill”.

Investigators only linked Lelandais to Noyer’s death after he was arrested over the murder of Maelys, who vanished in the early hours of August 27, 2017 while attending a wedding near Chambery with her parents.

Police searched for months for the girl before arresting Lelandais, who was also a guest at the wedding. He finally led them to her remains in February 2018 after traces of her blood were found in his car.

The two cases sparked fears that Lelandais could be involved in dozens of other unsolved disappearances in the region, and investigators reopened several cases after reviewing his background and movements over several years.

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The French Jewish community, the third largest in the world, has for months been on edge in the face of a growing number of attacks and desecrations of memorials.

“National police in Rouen neutralised early this morning an armed individual who clearly wanted to set fire to the city’s synagogue,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Police responded at 6.45 am to reports of “fire near the synagogue”, a police source said.

A source close to the case told AFP the man “was armed with a knife and an iron bar, he approached police, who fired. The individual died”.

“It is not only the Jewish community that is affected. It is the entire city of Rouen that is bruised and in shock,” Rouen Mayor Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol wrote on X.

He made clear there were no other victims other than the attacker.

Two separate investigations have been opened, one into the fire at the synagogue and another into the circumstances of the death of the individual killed by the police, Rouen prosecutors said.

Such an investigation by France’s police inspectorate general is automatic whenever an individual is killed by the police.

The man threatened a police officer with a knife and the latter used his service weapon, said the Rouen prosecutor.

The dead man was not immediately identified, a police source said.

Asked by AFP, the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office said that it is currently assessing whether it will take up the case.

France has the largest Jewish community of any country after Israel and the United States, as well as Europe’s largest Muslim community.

There have been tensions in France in the wake of the October 7th attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on Israel, followed by the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

Red hand graffiti was painted onto France’s Holocaust Memorial earlier this week, prompted anger including from President Emmanuel Macron who condemned “odious anti-Semitism”.

“Attempting to burn a synagogue is an attempt to intimidate all Jews. Once again, there is an attempt to impose a climate of terror on the Jews of our country. Combating anti-Semitism means defending the Republic,” Yonathan Arfi, the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF). wrote on X.

France was hit from 2015 by a spate of Islamist attacks that also hit Jewish targets. There have been isolated attacks in recent months and France’s security alert remains at its highest level.