An Algerian nanny is on trial for poisoning a French Jewish family with toxic household products, Le Parisien first reported on Monday.
Leïla Y., 42, worked with the couple’s three children, aged two, five, and seven, from late 2023 to January 2024.
According to the report, on January 30, the father went to the police station to report an incident. A few days earlier, his wife had drunk wine that tasted like a household product. She also claimed that her makeup remover burned her eyes, and that, the night before, a few minutes after the nanny left, she had noticed foam on a bottle of grape juice and a smell of bleach in the wine.
Aside from the family, the nanny was the only one with access to the house.
The police seized several suspicious containers and cleaning products: an all-purpose cleaning spray and a bleach-based product called WC Activ.
Then, on February 3, the five-year-old daughter told her mother that she had seen the nanny decant a soapy product into a bottle of alcohol.
A toxicology report carried out by the police found polyethylene glycol (PEG) and other chemical agents in the family’s wine, whisky, fig alcohol, grape juice, and even pasta.
PEG is used in many products, such as eye drops and cosmetics, due to its surfactant and humectant properties. These chemicals are “harmful, even corrosive, and can cause serious injuries to the digestive tract,” according to the Criminal Court Referral Order (ORTC).
Poisons Jewish kids 'because they have money and power'
The nanny was remanded in police custody on February 5 last year. She ultimately confessed to the crime, claiming she poisoned the family "because they have money and power."
“I should never have worked for Jews; they only brought me problems,” she told the police, according to the report.
She admitted that she intended to punish the family as a “warning” about a wage dispute: “I knew it might make them feel pain, but not so much that it would kill them.”
According to Le Parisien, a security guard at the children’s Jewish school testified that there was indeed a financial dispute between the family and the nanny and that she had also, in the past, made antisemitic comments.
“She complained about this family, she said that they were stingy, that they didn’t want to pay her more, even a euro. Then she told me the famous phrase: “They have money, they can give it to me,” the guard was quoted as saying.
While the nanny was originally indicted for "attempted poisoning", this was reevaluated, as the legal threshold for poisoning requires that the products be likely to cause death.
Instead, she now faces trial on Tuesday in Nanterre criminal court for “administration of a harmful substance, committed because of race, ethnicity, nation or religion.”