A former police officer suspected of being the serial killer behind some of France’s oldest unsolved cases has been found dead after 35 years of dodging arrest, just as police were closing in on his identity.
Francois Verove, 59, committed suicide at his home in the south of France after receiving a summons for questioning, leaving a “written statement,” prosecutors said.
DNA evidence confirmed his identity, they added.
The man — nicknamed “Le Grele,” French for “pockmarked” — had been wanted by police since the 1980s in connection with the killing and rape of young girls, but was never caught.
The list of crimes he allegedly committed in the 1980s and 90s includes rape of minors, murder, attempted murder, armed robbery and kidnapping of minors, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement late on Thursday.
“DNA tests which were immediately ordered by the investigating magistrate established a match between the genetic profile found at several crime scenes and that of the dead man,” she added.
In the most notorious case, he was suspected of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl named Cecile who was found dead in the basement of the building where she lived in Paris.
Police believe that he grabbed her as she came out of the building’s lift on her way to school and dragged her into the basement.
He is also thought to have strangled a couple to death in the central Marais District of the capital in 1987.
Over the past few years, investigators came to believe that the suspect might have been part of the gendarmerie — police-like armed forces in charge of internal security — at the time of the crimes, and established a DNA profile of him.
In the past few months, an investigating magistrate had begun questioning about 750 members of the force who had been deployed in the Paris at the time.
One of them was Verove, who was sent a summons on Sept. 24 for questioning on Wednesday.
He was reported missing by his wife on Mondai and found dead two days later in Grau-du-Roi, a seaside resort on the Mediterranean coast, Beccuau said.
Local media reported that Verove mentioned “past impulses” in a letter he left behind, which he had since brought “under control,” and said he had committed no crimes after 1997. The murder confession contained no specifics, the reports said.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS