Halima and Ahmed Touloub on trial for death of Inass Touloub
The blue blanket at kilometre 135
On August 11, 1987, a seasonal maintenance worker cutting grass along the A10 motorway discovered a four-year-old girl’s body wrapped in a blue woolen blanket in a ditch near Blois, an event that launched a decades-long mystery examined at the Loir-et-Cher assize court in November 2026.
Frédéric Laujon, alors saisonnier de 21 ans travaillant pour Cofiroute, fauchait les herbes hautes au point kilométrique 135 de l’autoroute A10 entre Orléans et Blois lorsqu’une couverture bleue dans le fossé s’est soulevée pour laisser voir le visage très tuméfié de la fillette.
Nearly forty years later, the witness, now a 60-year-old teacher, told the court in Blois that he initially panicked before alerting his supervisor.
Radiologist details untreated skeletal injuries suffered by child
Medical testimony presented during the trial detailed the extent of the injuries suffered by the child, who was eventually identified thirty years later through DNA profiling as Inass Touloub. Philippe Agnard, a retired radiologist who performed the initial skeletal examination in 1987, described multiple untreated fractures, including a broken right rib, a calcified elbow, and a lesion on the right humerus, noting that every movement the child made would have caused pain, according to reporting by franceinfo.
Francis Fourcroy, a retired gendarme from the Orléans research section who inspected the body at the morgue in 1987, told the court that it was the only case in his entire career where he encountered an abused child in such a severe condition. Initial bites found on the body were first attributed by investigators to an animal before further analysis indicated they were inflicted by an adult, as L’Indépendant noted.
Defendants remain largely unresponsive during trial hearings
Halima El Bakhti, now 72 years old, is on trial for acts of torture and barbarity resulting in death without intent to kill, while 74-year-old Ahmed Touloub faces charges of complicity before the Loir-et-Cher assize court. Throughout the hearings presided over by Audrey Debeugny, both defendants have remained largely unresponsive and seated, with Ahmed Touloub leaning on a cane when asked if he recognized photographs of the victim from police files.
When confronted with the investigative records and asked when she realized the child on the missing posters was her daughter, Halima El Bakhti maintained that she only understood this during questioning by an examining magistrate in 2018, repeating her initial statement that the victim could not be her child, while offering silence when pressed further by the court.