British security agent raped and murdered in Reunion

A British man working as a security agent on a merchant ship was raped and murdered on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion, a judicial source said on Friday.

Published: 21 November 2011 15:22 CET

A preliminary medical examination had found that Carl Davies died accidentally after a fall when his body was found on November 9th in Saint-Denis, the capital of the French overseas department.

But local prosecutor Richard Bometon on Friday opened an investigation for murder and rape over the death of Davies, who arrived on the island on November 7th on the container vessel Atlantic Trader, which he was protecting from piracy.

Davies, 33, was found dead on the morning of November 9th in a gutter on the outskirts of Saint-Denis after an evening spent in several bars along with two other British security agents who arrived with him on the same ship.

A first examination of his body concluded that a wound on his head indicated a fall of several metres. But an autopsy carried out on Thursday revealed a knife wound to the stomach, blows to the head and rape.

Examining magistrate Fabien Noailles called on the anti-crime brigade of the local police to lead an inquiry.

The British agent, an ex-soldier who served in Northern Ireland and Iraq, was seen for the last time on the night of November 7-8 in a Saint-Denis bar with the two other agents who, like him, were employed by a private British company.

Anglophile Eugene Evans, who spent the evening with the three men, told local newspapers “they were happy, looking for fun and paid for a lot of rounds”.

When the bar closed, he said, Davies — who had drunk a lot — did not want to go to the casino with his friends but “wanted to meet women”.

His family said he had been a Marine until 2005 before becoming a teacher at Sittingbourne in Kent, southeast England.

“But he needed action. He’d been away for two weeks when he was killed,” his sister Kerrie told the local newspaper Le Journal de l’Ile de la Reunion.

Davies’s disappearance was reported to the authorities on November 8th by shipping company CMACGM before the Atlantic Trader left in the evening for Mauritius.

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.