One week after the discovery, on August 13, of four bodies in the Seine River at Choisy-le-Roi in the Paris suburbs, the investigation took a significant step forward with the arrest of a suspect on Wednesday, August 20. “A man was taken into custody this morning on suspicion for multiple murders at the headquarters of the criminal brigade of the Paris judicial police,” the Créteil prosecutor’s office told Le Monde. The arrest was first reported by Le Parisien.
The charge for which the suspect was taken into custody, “multiple murders,” means that the suspect is suspected of having committed several separate murders in succession, without being convicted of one in between – in which case it would be considered recidivism. The maximum length of custody in these cases is 96 hours. The Créteil prosecutor’s office, which stated that it “will not comment further on this case at this time,” did not disclose how many murders the suspect was being questioned for.
The arrest marked a significant breakthrough in what had been a mysterious criminal investigation. On Wednesday, August 13, a passerby saw a body floating near the Choisy-le-Roi bridge and immediately alerted emergency services. While inspecting the area, police, firefighters and the river police discovered four submerged bodies.
‘Very advanced state of decomposition’
While the body seen by the passerby was “relatively well-preserved,” suggesting recent immersion, the other three were in “a very advanced state of decomposition,” the prosecutor’s office specified in a statement on Saturday. However, like the first body, one of the three more damaged corpses also showed signs of violence, leading to the opening of two murder investigations, both entrusted to the criminal brigade.
At this stage, nothing, aside from the location where the four bodies were found, allowed investigators to establish a link between the two cases. The bodies could very well have been submerged elsewhere in the Seine and brought together at the base of the Choisy-le-Roi bridge by the current, the shape of the riverbed, or by branches. The fact that they were found within a limited area “could be explained by the configuration of the river at that location,” the prosecutor’s office had stated on Saturday.
The identity of the first body was quickly established, likely helping to speed up the investigation: It was a man in his forties who lived in Val-de-Marne, east of Paris. As for the other three bodies, all adult men, numerous examinations, particularly forensic ones, have been underway in recent days to try to determine not only their identities but also the circumstances and dates of their deaths.
The placement in police custody of a suspect for “multiple murders” now opens up the possibility that the two criminal investigations are, in fact, related.
