Javier Villamor
December 4, 2025
Delphine Daviet, mother of Lola, arrives at the Paris Assize Court for the trial of Dahbia Benkired, accused of raping, torturing, and killing Lola Daviet, a 12-year-old girl, in 2022, on October 17, 2025.
Julien de Rosa / AFP
On Friday, October 17, 2025, the highly anticipated trial of Dahbia Benkired begins in Paris. She is suspected of having kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered 12-year-old Lola Daviet three years ago. The particularly heinous crime deeply shocked the French public due to its extreme violence and Benkired’s profile: an Algerian woman under an OQTF (obligation to leave French territory), whose motive remains unclear to this day.
The events took place on Friday, October 14th, 2022, in north-east Paris. On her way home from school, little Lola came across Dahbia Benkired, sitting near the entrance to the building where she lived. Benkired’s sister lived on the sixth floor of the same building.
The child was forcibly taken to the flat of Benkired’s sister, where her ordeal began. Lola was raped several times and subjected to violence with a knife and scissors while she was still alive, according to forensic findings.
As she lay dying, she was then “taped up” by Benkired: her legs, feet and wrists were bound with tape, and adhesive tape covered her entire face. The child died of asphyxiation. Lola’s body was then hidden in a suitcase, which was later found in the lobby of the building by a homeless man.
The motive remains unclear at this stage. “I killed her and that’s it,” the accused said during her first interrogation. Later, she said that she saw Lola turn into a “ghost” or “devil” on the day of the incident. While in police custody, Benkired said that she had “contact” with Lola’s mother, who was the building’s caretaker along with her husband, to obtain an access badge that she had refused to give her. She then “felt hatred.” Was that enough to justify such an outburst of hatred and violence?
During a discussion with friends in the summer before the crime, Benkired reportedly mentioned the existence of children, often blond, called “Zouhris” in Morocco and Algeria. According to her, these minors are kidnapped and killed as part of occult rituals in order to find “buried treasures.” Benkired wrote the numbers 0 and 1 in nail polish on Lola’s feet. According to investigators, these numbers play a central role in the black magic ceremonies mentioned by the suspect. When questioned about this, Dahbia Benkired denied ever having discussed the fate of the “Zouhris” children with friends, who maintain the opposite.
The list of charges is chilling: “murder of a fifteen-year-old minor in connection with rape committed with acts of torture and barbarity, and concealment of a corpse.”
But the sordid story does not end there. Lola’s father, Johan Daviet, never really recovered from his daughter’s death. He separated from his wife, sank into alcoholism, and died a year later, “heartbroken,” according to his loved ones. “His head and heart were too close to hell since what happened to his daughter. He was falling apart. His heart attack was the epilogue to this descent into hell,” said Lola’s family lawyer, Clotilde Lepetit. For Johan Daviet’s mother, her son “committed suicide with alcohol”. “He drank a litre of vodka every night,” she reported in Le Parisien.
When the murder was discovered, a strange atmosphere permeated Paris. All families were affected by the violent death of this blonde child, who was innocently returning home from school like so many other schoolchildren in the capital. The dignity of the family touched people’s hearts and very quickly, flowers piled up at the foot of Lola’s parents’ building as a tribute. An innocent drawing of little Lola went viral and was reposted by thousands of profiles on social media.
Je n’ai pas les mots, pour Lola. Mais j’ai mon crayon, alors voilà un minuscule hommage à cette petite. 💔
— Laurel (@bloglaurel) October 17, 2022
Personne ne peut imaginer ce que ressent sa famille. Des vies détruites.
Au passage j’aimerais savoir pourquoi ça ne fait pas la une de tous les journaux.#Lola #Lola12 ans pic.twitter.com/grJQNRCdLU
Very quickly, Lola’s murder took on a political dimension. The suspect was quickly identified, and her profile caused outrage: she was an Algerian woman living on the margins of society and a compulsive cannabis smoker. Subject to an OQTF, she was illegally present on French soil. The Left seized on public emotion to denounce the use of Lola’s death by the ‘far right.’
Today, the trial is being held in the presence of Delphine, Lola’s mother, and Thibault, her older brother. At the opening of the trial, they asked the accused for “the truth”—“for all of France and for us”—aware that the case now goes far beyond them.
Benkired’s sister, who was deported from France at the time of the incident, has returned to France but refused to appear in court.
Given Benkired’s profile, there was a risk that she would not be held responsible for her actions. Fortunately, the psychiatric assessment concluded that she was fit to stand trial. At the request of Lola’s mother, the trial is public. Among the crowd of people who came to attend the hearings, we see a few prominent figures, such as Claire Geronimi, vice-president of the UDR allied with the RN, who has become a media and political figure denouncing the dysfunctions linked to OQTF—having herself been raped by an illegal immigrant. The right-wing feminist collective Némésis is also present.
A petition, launched on the initiative of the Institute for Justice, calls for Benkired to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole—the maximum penalty. At a time when France has just celebrated the induction into the Panthéon of lawyer Robert Badinter, who ended the death penalty in 1981, Lola’s case serves as a reminder that the judicial system can never be too severe.
