A Sudanese illegal migrant has been sentenced to twenty years in prison after being found guilty of murdering his former girlfriend, a pro-migrant activist, in 2019.
Rifat Abbas, a 34-year old Sudanese illegal migrant was found guilty in a court in the Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis on Friday, receiving a prison sentence of twenty years. The migrant was accused of stabbing his former girlfriend, 27-year-old Audrey Coignard, to death in her apartment on September 16th of 2019.
The lawyer for Abbas told the court that her client should receive a merciful sentence in light of his tough migratory journey through Libya where he was allegedly tortured, Le Figaro reported.
On Thursday, the Sudanese national admitted that he had “stabbed” his former victim in order to “silence her”.
“I was afraid that the neighbours would hear and the police would come,” he said.
Friends of the victim spoke out about Coignard, saying she was “an activist and passionate medical student, Audrey was always ready to support her family, friends and the people she met on her way,” French newspaper L’Orne Combattante reports.
Coignard was found dead in September of 2019 and her then-32-year-old former Sudanese illegal migrant boyfriend was arrested and indicted for her murder by the prosecutor’s office of Bobigny in October of that year.
Investigators say that the body of the 27-year-old was found in her apartment at around 4 pm on September 16th and that her body showed wounds consistent with those inflicted by a knife. According to a report from the newspaper Le Parisien, Coignard had been stabbed at least fourteen times.
Coignard had worked as a medical intern at a local hospital and had also volunteered with a local pro-migrant group that fought against the expulsions of illegals from France.
The murder was just one of several involving migrants accused of murdering French women in 2019.
Earlier that year in June, a Pakistani migrant was accused of murdering a 23-year-old woman who was found suffocated to death in the trunk of her own car after being missing for several days. The young woman had been employed as an intern for a company supplying ice cream to a supermarket chain and her last known location had been a supermarket where the Pakistani had been employed.
A month later in July, a Syrian migrant was arrested in southwest France on suspicion of raping and murdering a 24-year-old mother who is said to have suffered from a slight mental disability.