PARIS (CN) - On Friday, Algerian national Dahbia Benkired became the first woman to receive France's harshest punishment - life in prison without parole - for the brutal rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl.

"Make no mistake," the public prosecutor told the Paris criminal court on Friday morning. "No drug treatment can fundamentally transform Ms. Benkired's personality - when there is no illness, there is no treatment."

In 2022, Lola Daviet - a 12-year-old girl living in Paris - was reported missing after she didn't come home from school one night. After her parents alerted authorities, she was later found in a trunk near her home. Daviet had over 30 stab wounds and other visible signs of injury.

After receiving witness reports and analyzing video surveillance footage, authorities tracked down the now-27-year-old Dahbia Benkired, an Algerian woman living in France under a deportation order, and arrested her on the same day Daviet's body was discovered.

Benkired was charged and convicted of murdering and raping a minor, torture and acts of barbarity, and kidnapping.

"I ask for forgiveness. What I did is horrible," were the only words that Benkired said to the courtroom in her final statement on Friday. She had remained expressionless and motionless throughout the hearings, with her gaze fixated on whoever had the floor.

During the weeklong trial, which ran from Oct. 17 to Friday, the courtroom heard brutal accounts of what Benkired did to Daviet, but received no clarity on why she did it. Psychologists found nothing in her personality that would suggest a disorder, which they said was immensely frustrating.

"In 15 years of expertise, this is the first time I've felt this way," Karine Jean, a court psychiatrist, told the courtroom in an emotional account. "I found myself faced with a paralysis of my thoughts, a feeling of unease that catches in the throat."

Jean told the courtroom that Benkired was interested in the media coverage the case was receiving. After hours of psychologists expressing how exasperating it was to interrogate Benkired, she was given the chance to respond.

"I realized that I was talking nonsense to them," she said in a barely audible, high voice. Julien Quere, the president of the court, asked if there was anything else she'd like to add. There wasn't.

In October 2022, Benkired was living with her sister upstairs in Daviet's building while illegally in France under a deportation order. When Daviet was coming home from school, Benkired asked if she could help her with her suitcases. Daviet said she had been instructed not to go into strangers' homes, but Benkired insisted, and lured her into her sister's apartment.

Over the hour and a half that followed, Benkired asked Daviet to take a shower before assaulting and raping her. Then, she taped her mouth and nose shut, forcing her to suffocate - she said that she played music and smoked a cigarette to drown out the sounds of the schoolgirl's body jolting. Daviet's body was covered in stab wounds, and the bottoms of her feet were branded with the figures 0 and 1 - despite efforts during the trial to uncover what that meant, the reason remained unclear.

Video footage showed Benkired exiting the same building carrying a trunk, which she brought to a nearby cafe. On those cameras, a man who she met on the street was sitting next to her, and she urged him to open the trunk, which contained Daviet's body covered in a sheet. The man ultimately alerted authorities.

When Benkired was brought into custody, the investigator showed her photo after photo of Daviet's corpse, to which Benkired would reply "again," as shown in the video of the interrogation. Before confessing to the crime that night, she smiled and said, "I've always wanted to be a police officer."

Alexandre Valois, her lawyer, argued in an almost two-hour closing statement on Friday morning that although Benkired was guilty of the crime, she wasn't guilty for having a troubled past. He spoke as if on stage, circling around the room with no notes to reference.

Ultimately, it wasn't enough to convince the court that Benkired should be spared from France's harshest punishment. The "perpetuite incompressible" sentence was created in 1994 following a period of particularly shocking crimes. The idea was to make life in prison truly irreversible - since then, only roughly a dozen men, mostly terrorists and serial killers, have faced it. It has never been handed down to a woman.

Valois told reporters on Friday evening that Benkired has not yet decided on whether she'll appeal the verdict.  

"We know the truth, deep down," Clothilde Lepetit, one of Daviet's lawyers, said in her closing statement on Thursday. "Science, Lola's body has spoken, the investigators, the judges ... All of this got the better of you, Ms. Benkired." 

The case has shocked France. It has also become a major political issue, with the far right using Benkired's deportation order as fuel for its anti-immigration agenda.

"Lola is one barbaric murder too many," Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's extreme-right National Rally, told the French TV station Europe 1 in 2022. "It's been several times, too many times, that illegal immigrants, often under a temporary residence permit, have committed terrible crimes."

Daviet's family said they "absolutely don't want political exploitation" of the case that same year.

On Friday morning, Alice Cordier - the 27-year-old founder of the group Nemesis, one of whose three primary objectives is to "denounce the dangerous impact of mass immigration on western women so that this subject becomes a public debate" - was standing in the entryway of the Paris criminal court, wearing a long beige trench coat.

She told Courthouse News that it's important for Nemesis representatives to be at the trial to denounce the "terrible rape" and "barbaric murder." Since feminist associations are predominantly left-wing today, Cordier said, this trial doesn't suit them. She added that although they've come to the trial, left-wing feminist groups have tried to emphasize that Benkired claimed to have been raped, and focus on her past trauma.

When the verdict was read on Friday evening to a limited audience, Daviet's brother and mother reportedly embraced and burst into tears. Benkired did not react.

Earlier that morning, most of Daviet's family and supporters wore matching white t-shirts with a message underneath a portrait of the young girl smiling: "You'll be the sun of our lives and the star of our nights."

Source: Courthouse News Service