Demands for investigation after 38-year-old killed girl who shot water pistol at him in Calais after managing to return to France despite multiple convictions

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

A Polish man who was supposed to have been expelled from France admitted on Thursday to kidnapping and killing a 9-year-old girl in the northern town of Calais after she shot a water pistol at him.

Police arrested the 38-year-old, who was intoxicated, hours after the kidnapping, rape and killing of the girl on Wednesday. She had been playing in a park before being violently abducted by the suspect after she sprayed water on him from her pistol as he drank a beer, prosecutor Jean-Pierre Valensi said.

Thousands of citizens marched through Calais on Thursday to express their outrage and support for the family.

Valensi told reporters the body of the girl showed she was strangled and sexually assaulted after the man threw her in his car and took her to a nearby woods. Valensi said the suspect, who was not identified, admitted “immediately” to the killing after his arrest.

Authorities are trying to unravel the suspect’s tangled judicial past and establish how a man convicted twice, in 2004 and 2010, apparently returned to France after being outlawed.

The prosecutor said France was, in the end, unable to force the man out of the country on the basis of his past convictions, for extortion with violence, aggravated theft and séquestration (the act of holding a person against their will by use of violence, deceit or threats).

However, he was handed over to Polish authorities last year based on a European arrest warrant for a robbery in Poland in 2000. The warrant was issued in 2010.

Justice minister Christine Taubira demanded a “complete, precise, rapid” investigation.

“What we owe the family,” said prime minister Manuel Valls, “is the entire truth.”