Two teenagers have been arrested near Paris after the body of a 14-year-old girl was found in the Seine river.
The girl was found on Monday at about 20:30 local time (19:30 GMT), and the arrests were made in the Argenteuil suburb about five hours later.
The mother of the girl, who has not been named, told French media on Tuesday that her daughter had frequently been a victim of bullying.
The teenagers were arrested after one of their mothers called the police.
The 15-year-old boy came home on Monday afternoon with his girlfriend, also 15, and told his mother that he had hit a girl and she had fallen into the Seine, local prosecutors said.
A source close to the investigation, who asked not to be named, told AFP news agency that the boy had blood on his clothes when he came home.
Shortly afterwards the two teenagers – having changed clothes – went to another friend’s house.
His mother then went to the places her son had told her they had been, and found a bloodied glove and a lock of hair.
Police said an initial on-the-spot examination of the victim’s body showed she had “marks of blows to the head and face”, and that a postmortem examination would be carried out to determine the cause of death.
The victim’s mother told French broadcaster BFM TV that she had lodged a complaint about bullying to the police on the evening that her daughter disappeared.
“She told me, ‘mum I have big problems, I was threatened with death by this boy and this girl’, and she got into a fight with her a week before,” she said.
All three teenagers went to the same school in Argenteuil. Other pupils from the school told AFP that photos of the victim “in underwear” were posted on Snapchat.
“The other girl [who has been arrested] wrote on social media that she was a whore,” one pupil, who asked not to be named, said. “The victim did not like it and it degenerated.”
bbc
