FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
PARIS – On February 28, 2007 Bouchaïb Moqadem, married father of five children, after visiting his family of origin in Morocco was returning to his wife Geneviève Lhermitte and their five children at their home in Nivelles, in French-speaking Belgium. But before his return, in the early afternoon his wife massacred – strangling and stabbing them in the throat – the five children Yasmine, Nora, Myriam, Mina et Mehdi (15, 12, 10, 7 and 3)taking them to their rooms one by one as they watched the film on television Spy Kids 3. The woman then tried to kill herself with a stab in the chest, but she failed. She then attempted suicide in prison.
On 28 February 2023, last Tuesday, exactly 16 years after the day of the massacre, Geneviève Lhermitte obtained euthanasia at the Léonard de Vinci hospital in Montigny-le-Tilleul, about 60 kilometers south of Brussels. Thus ends a story that shocked Belgian and European public opinion and which was brought to the cinema in 2012 by director Joachim Lafosse with the film “A perdre la raison”. By virtue of a 2002 law in Belgium euthanasia is authorized to put an end to physical but also psychic suffering, which is ascertained as “constant, unbearable and unavoidable». Geneviève Lhermitte, who killed her five children, manifested her will “in a reasoned and repeated manner”, according to the requisites required by law, and therefore was helped to die.
The trial revealed a shocking family affair, between apparent normality and unclear aspects. Geneviève Lhermitte had a childhood marked by the hardness of her parents, anaffective. She met twenty-year-old Bouchaïb Moqadem in 1990, she got married and in 1992 her first daughter, Yasmine, was born. After an early postpartum depression, the woman left teaching to stay at home. Her husband Bouchaïb Moqadem, having abandoned his mathematics and physics studies, devoted himself to small jobs but the family was in fact supported by Dr. Michel Schaar, the man who helped Bouchaïb to move from Morocco to Belgium, and who was the godfather of the five children. The figure of Doctor Schaar has always remained ambiguous, between benefactor and intrusive presence: he lived a couple of days a week with his family, married a sister of Bouchaïb Moqadem and then divorced but a white marriage is suspected, to allow the woman to move to Belgium. In the farewell letter that Geneviève Lhermitte wrote to her friend Valéria before the massacre, the woman reserved terrible words for him: «There is no solution to the problem. I made the decision to leave with my children, far away, and forever. Michel Schaar is a scoundrel who ruined my life, stole my intimacy with my children and my husband. I left my parents’ house and fell from one hell to another.’
During the trial, Geneviève Lhermitte evoked the violence suffered by her husband and the fact that she was forced to live practically a prisoner, without being able to see her sister except in secret. Dr. Michel Schaar and her husband Bouchaïb Moqadem have always defended themselves by saying that the woman blamed them for a crime that she herself was unable to accept. The husband in particular painted a family that is certainly not perfect but rather happy, with five lively and brilliant children in school, and has denied having committed violence. In 2010, the man remarried and is the father of a daughter. In 2019, Michel Schaar relaunched the procedures to officially adopt Bouchaïb Moqadem. After the life sentence, Geneviève Lhermitte was granted semi-freedom and hospitalization in a psychiatric clinic. Her maternal uncle, André, recently welcomed her home on weekends. “I tried not to think about what she had done. I wanted to make her life as serene as possible, I had to do it, out of humanity. But it wasn’t easy for me either. She wandered around the house, took a walk, we had dinner together. She has served her sentence a thousand times in her head, people have to understand. But she was no longer able to live.’ The house where Geneviève Lhermitte, Bouchaïb Moqadem, their five children and Dr. Michel Schaar lived, worth around 300,000 euros, was sold in 2012 for 195,000.
