Genevieve Lhermitte smiling with her family … before she slit the throat of all five children
To the world, she looked like a doting mother smiling as she put her arms around her five young children as they opened presents.
But, months after this family photograph was taken, Genevieve Lhermitte went on to slit the throats of her children, aged three to 14, with a kitchen knife at their home in Nivelles, Belgium, in a case that shocked the country.
And exactly 16 years after Lhermitte, 56, slaughtered her children – three-year-old Mehdi, Mina, seven, Myriam, ten, Nora, 12, Yasmine, 14 – on 28 February 2007, she was euthanised at her own request on Tuesday.
Her ex-husband Bouchaib Moqadem, who was visiting his parents in Morocco when Lhermitte launched her attack, revealed he still struggles to cope following his children’s ‘massacre’.
‘I keep my feelings to myself, I can’t share them. It’s a massacre 16 years ago, I have nothing more to say,’ the grieving father told SudInfo, adding that the murders of his children remains a ‘difficult ordeal’ for him to deal with.
A heartbreaking image emerged today of Lhermitte smiling with Moqadem and their five young children – months before she went on to murder them. The youngest, Mehdi, is seen sitting next to his mother as he smiles broadly at the camera.
On 28 February 2007, Lhermitte stole two knives from a supermarket before cooking what would be a final meal for her five children. She locked the door and began slitting each child’s throat.
Lhermitte, who was 40 at the time of the murders, told her trial in 2008 that her eldest daughter, Yasmine, 14, was too big for her to handle so she tricked her into putting a blindfold on for a ‘surprise’.
When when the teenager was unable to see, her mother hit her over the head with a heavy marble tabletop, knocking her out before also killing her with a knife.
Lhermitte then tried to end her own life by stabbing herself, but the attempt failed and she ended up calling the emergency services.
Police found her body spread-eagled in the hall. Lhermitte later told police she felt ‘desperate and trapped’ at having to be at home with the children while her husband was away, the court heard.
Lhermitte was sentenced to life in prison in 2008, before being moved to a psychiatric hospital in 2019.
Her lawyer Nicolas Cohen said his client had died through euthanasia on the sixteenth anniversary of the killings on Tuesday.