Two detained after woman found dead in Paris hotel room

Two women have been arrested after a third woman in her early 40s was found dead in a hotel room in France's capital this weekend, prosecutors said on Monday.

Published: 15 January 2024 17:31 CET

Two detained after woman found dead in Paris hotel room

A police vehicle in Lorient, western France. (Photo by LOIC VENANCE / AFP)

Both women were “acquaintances of the victim”, who was born in 1980, the Paris prosecutor’s office said, without giving a nationality for any of them.

The victim had been staying at the hotel in northwest Paris for around a week when a cleaner discovered her lifeless body face down on her bed on Saturday, a police source told AFP on Sunday.

She was found with a “deep wound to the carotid artery” of the neck, and presented “defence wounds” on an arm showing she had tried to fend off an attacker, but no “sharp object” was found in the room, the source said.

There was blood on her T-shirt and bed sheets as well as on towels in the bathroom.

Forensics were to conduct an autopsy on Monday.

The victim had arrived at the hotel with a man, who at first stayed in the next-door room, the police source said, without giving his nationality.

According to the first elements of the investigation, he left the hotel at 6:30 am on Saturday, several hours before the body was discovered.

The prosecutor’s office did not say whether he had been detained.

Two other women, also linked to the man and staying in other rooms at the same hotel, left later on Saturday morning.

Le Parisien newspaper on Monday said it was these women, aged 27 and 37, who had been detained at Charles de Gaulle airport on Sunday. It said the victim, the two women and the man were Brazilian.

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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.