Sabrina Kouider was convicted and sentenced over the murder of a nanny. Photo / Facebook
Sabrina Kouider was convicted and sentenced over the murder of a nanny. Photo / Facebook
A French couple who tortured their nanny to death before trying to burn her body in the back garden of their London home have been jailed for life.
Sabrina Kouider and Ouissem Medouni convinced themselves au pair Sophie Lionnet was spying on them for Kouider's ex, former Boyzone member Mark Walton.
Kouider's obsession with Walton drove her and her partner to increasingly extreme lengths as they tortured and interrogated Lionnet, a shy French 21-year-old who had never even met the former popstar, the Daily Mail reports.
A couple who murdered their French nanny have been jailed for a minimum 30 years.
Sabrina Kouider and Ouissem Medouni tortured 21 year old Sophie Lionnet before disposing her body on a bonfire at their home near Wimbledon. pic.twitter.com/J3x4IZ9jZW
— Global's Newsroom (@GlobalsNewsroom) June 26, 2018
A chilling clip, filmed days before her death, showed her emaciated and weak at the couple's home near Wimbledon. She was killed in the bath during an interrogation session in September last year.
Kouider and Medouni denied Miss Lionnet's murder, blaming each other for her death, but were found guilty by a jury. Today they were each jailed for at least 30 years.
Despite having put Miss Lionnet's family through the ordeal of a trial, Kouider apologised to her victim in a statement read out in court today.
Kouider wrote: "Sophie I am shocked and sad that you are not part of this world any more. It feels like a horrible dream to me that I wish I could just wake up from.
"I am suffering every day thinking of you and what happened to you and I wish I could turn the clock back."
Passing sentence, Judge Nicholas Hilliard said Kouider and Medouni could have used the interrogation videos showing Sophie's false confessions to extract money from Mr Walton.
Judge Hilliard said: "It always struck me that there might be a reason, that the videos might be sent to Mark Walton to extract financial gain from him."
The judge told the couple: "It is plain that you were volatile and prone to outbursts of temper.
"I am sure that subsequent accusations were, to a significant degree, driven by a desire to exact revenge upon Mark Walton for what you managed to persuade yourself he had done and not simply to ensure that the matter was investigated and justice take its course.
Sophie Lionnet. Photo / Facebook
"In June 2017, Sophie wrote to her father and said she was being verbally abused and accused of things she wouldn't do and wanted to come back.
"Where you had previously been involved in a kind of mental torture of her during the interrogations of her, it is plain to me that you now engaged in physical torture of her."
The judge added: "I am sure on all the evidence that you were in fact both involved in torturing Sophie in the bath in the lead up to her death and making her think she would drown unless she gave you information that you wanted but was not in her power to give because it didn't exist.
"The suffering and terror you put her through before her death was prominent and without pity."
The trial heard more than eight hours of recorded interrogations, in which Miss Lionnet was slapped, likened to a Nazi collaborator and called 'worse than a murderer' by the couple.
In her final days, Miss Lionnet was hit with an electrical cable and beaten so badly she had five fractured ribs and a cracked breast bone.
She appeared broken and disorientated in a videoed confession hours before she was tortured and killed in the bath.
When firefighters investigated a pungent-smelling smoke coming from a bonfire, Medouni tried to pass off her charred remains as a sheep. The couple were also cooking a barbecue in an attempt to mask the smell.
And Kouider claimed to police that Miss Lionnet had run off with LA-based Mr Walton in an attempt to frame him for her disappearance.
Icah Peart QC, mitigating for Kouider, said his client suffered from emotionally unstable personality disorder and another "delusional disorder".
Sabrina Kouider was convicted and sentenced over the murder of a nanny. Photo / Facebook
Mr Peart added that Kouider was completely convinced by her delusions, telling the judge: "She held the delusional belief that Ms Lionnet was in league with Mark Walton. The entirety of her behaviour was influenced by her mental illness."
Orlando Pownall QC, mitigating for Medouni, said the Frenchman was the weak partner in their relationship and was preyed upon by Kouider.
Mr Pownall said: "The assumption is that the male is the dominant party but in this particular case, we submit, it is plain that the female defendant was both physically and mentally dominant and she indoctrinated this defendant.
"There is evidence before the court Ms Kouider preyed on the weak and we respectfully submit that it's plain that Mr Medouni was, in his relationship to her, weak."
