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Policeman Commits Suicide To Escape Arrest For Murder

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A 59-year-old French policeman has committed suicide to escape being arrested for killing some persons.

Francois Verove is said to have murdered himself after a crime he committed many years ago was about to be leaked.

Naija News learnt that the deceased have been dodging arrest for over thirty-five years after recent finding revealed he is connected to some of France’s oldest unsolved cases.

After learning that police were closing in on his identity, Verove killed himself at his rented home in the south of France.

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Reports gathered that he took his life after receiving a summons for questioning, leaving a “written statement” and with DNA evidence then confirming his identity.

The Paris prosecutor and sources revealed the officer had been wanted by police since the 1980s for the murder and rape of young girls but was never caught. The list of crimes he allegedly committed in the 1980s and 90s includes rape of minors, murder, attempted murder, armed robbery and kidnapping of minors.

Speaking on the officer’s old bad records, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement dated Thursday that; “DNA tests which were immediately ordered by the investigating magistrate established a match between the genetic profile found at several crime scenes and that of the dead man.”

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Naija News learnt that Verove had left behind a written confession before killing himself.

A source close to the case told AFP that the most notorious case, he was suspected of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl named Cecile who was found dead in the basement of the building where she lived in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. Police suspected that Verove had grabbed the girl after she came out of the building’s lift on her way to school and dragged her into the basement.

He is also thought to have strangled a couple to death in the central Marais district of the capital in 1987.

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Over the years, investigators came to believe that the suspect may have been part of the gendarmerie — police-like armed forces in charge of internal security — at the time of the crimes, and established a DNA profile of him. In recent months, an investigating magistrate had begun questioning around 750 gendarmes who had been deployed in the Paris region at the time.

Naija News understands that Verove who lives in the south of France received a summons on September 24 for questioning on September 29, after which he was reported missing by his wife on September 27.

Two days later, his lifeless body was found in Grau-du-Roi, a seaside resort on the Mediterranean coast, the Paris prosecutor said.

He was a former gendarme, who later became a police officer and then retired, she confirmed.

Verove reportedly mentioned past impulses in a letter he left behind, which he had since brought “under control”, and said he had committed no crimes after 1997. The murder confession contained no specifics, they said.

A lawyer for Cecile’s family, Didier Seban, thanked police for their work but also told AFP that it was “painful to know that the criminal took his secrets with him”.