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PARIS: Police in France detained four people suspected in a plot targeting exiled Russian rights activist Vladimir Osechkin, who exposes abuses in Russian prisons, France’s national anti-terror prosecution office said.
In an interview with The Associated Press Friday, Osechkin, who founded a rights group for prisoners in the notoriously tough Russian carceral system, said he believed Russia’s security services were behind a plot to kill him after he saw video evidence from French police, including video footage of his home.
“I saw how everyone was filming, how they prepared the sites from which to shoot,” he told the AP, adding he believes “this was an expensive special operation, sanctioned and financed from Moscow.”
The General Directorate for Internal Security, France’s counter-espionage and counterterror intelligence service, has been the leading the investigation, the anti-terror prosecution office said on Thursday evening.
It said four men aged between 26 and 38 were detained Monday but gave no details about their nationalities, any possible motives for allegedly targeting Osechkin or whether the men are suspected of links to foreign spy services. Osechkin said he believes some of the men detained are from Dagestan, a region in Russia’s south Caucasus.
Following questioning, France’s anti-terror prosecution office said the four men are being kept in detention on a preliminary terror-related charge, enabling investigators to continue holding them while the probe continues.
French officials did not confirm there had been an attempt on Osechkin’s life. The AP did not immediately receive a reply from the Russian Foreign Ministry over the allegations.
A campaign of alleged Russian sabotage and attacks
The French intelligence service is among multiple European agencies that have been investigating what Western officials say is a broad campaign of alleged Russian sabotage and hybrid warfare targeting European allies of Ukraine. That campaign has included multiple arson attacks across Europe, as well as cyberattacks and espionage.
Four European intelligence officials told the AP earlier this year that Moscow is threatening exiled opponents and running what they described as an assassination program targeting perceived enemies of the state. That has included attempts to assassinate high-profile figures such as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky while in Poland and the head of a German arms manufacturer that provides weapons to Ukraine. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
The Kremlin has previously denied Russia is carrying out a sabotage campaign against the West.
Osechkin has long suspected that he could be targeted for possible assassination because of his work, even in exile in Biarritz, the beach resort town on southwest France’s Atlantic seaboard where he lives. He said there have been several threats on his life since 2022, most recently in February this year.
He said the suspects “circled the area” and filmed in detail the place where he regularly did livestreams on his social media channels and looked for escape routes to leave unnoticed.
Osechkin said he believes he is only alive because French police previously provided him with protection. He said he remains at risk although French police carried out arrests in the wake of earlier death threats, adding that he and his family are often moved to safe houses when new threats emerge.
“Those who were arrested are just a part of the overall picture, they are part of a big team,” he said.
Activism work includes videos and accounts of Russian prisons
During questioning, Osechkin said French authorities asked him about his activities and “in what way this could cause anger and aggression from the Kremlin, Putin and his intelligence services and why they are trying to kill me.”
Osechkin sought political asylum in France after fleeing Russia under pressure from authorities over his prison activism. His group routinely publishes videos and accounts of alleged torture and corruption in Russian prisons, and he was among the first to reveal that Russia’s military was recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine.
His group, Gulagu.net, also helped bring Russian fugitive paratrooper Pavel Filatiev to France in 2022. Filatiev served in Ukraine war before being injured, and later published accounts online of what he saw, accusing the Russian military leadership of betraying their own troops out of incompetence and corruption.
Other Russian defectors have been killed. In 2024, Spanish police found the bullet-riddled body of Russian helicopter pilot Maxim Kuzminov in southern Spain. He escaped across the front lines and into Ukraine with a helicopter in 2023. The head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin, subsequently told Russian journalists that Kuzminov was a “traitor and criminal” who was a “moral corpse.”
Osechkin suggested other critics of President Vladimir Putin’s “regime” including Russian opposition figures and journalists are also at risk and said the goal was not only to silence him but also them.
“This isn’t just about the killing of me as an individual,” Osechkin said, but also an attempt “to frighten other human rights activists into reducing their activity or stopping it altogether.”

PARIS: An Algerian woman apologized for her “horrible” actions Friday as she went on trial accused of raping and murdering a 12-year-old girl in Paris, in a case that sparked horror in France and was seized by the far right.
Dahbia Benkired, now aged 27, was detained after Lola Daviet went missing in the northeast of the French capital three years ago. The girl’s body was then found in a trunk in the lobby of the building where her father and mother worked as caretakers.
Conservative and far-right politicians seized on the case to call for better immigration law enforcement, after Benkired was found to have overstayed a student visa and failed to comply with a notice to leave France.
The victim’s mother has urged politicians to stop exploiting her daughter’s death.
On Friday, the girl’s family sat in court, wearing white T-shirts with a picture of a smiling child and the words: “You were the sun of our life, you will be the star of our nights.”
“I am waiting for justice to be done,” said Lola’s mother Delphine Daviet.
One woman in her fifties broke down in tears when the defendant entered the dock.
“I apologize to the whole family,” Benkired said in a monotone. “It’s horrible what I did. I regret it.”
She was found competent to stand trial.

- ‘Selling a kidney’ -

Although experts who evaluated Benkired’s mental health noted her “manipulative behavior” they said she did not suffer from any “major psychiatric disorder.”
One of the victim’s brothers, Thibaut Daviet, urged the accused to tell “all the truth and nothing but the truth.”
Building residents saw Benkired in the lobby of the apartment block in the 19th district on October 14, 2022, carrying suitcases and a heavy trunk covered in a blanket, the investigation showed.
An hour and a half earlier, security footage showed Benkired approaching the girl as she returned from school, then leading her into the flat her sister occupied in the building.
Benkired raped and hit the schoolgirl with scissors and a box cutter, then bound her up in duct tape, including around her face, leading to her death by asphyxia.
She placed the body in a trunk and exited the building, pausing outside a cafe, where she told a client who suspected something strange in her luggage that she was “selling a kidney,” investigators said.
She then convinced a friend to drive her and the bags to his home, before taking a taxi with the trunk back to the building where her sister lived. She fled when she saw police deployed in the area, but was arrested the next day.

- ‘Twenty joints a day’ -

In court, Benkired described growing up in a dysfunctional family, a childhood spent between Algeria and France, unloving aunts and a violent father.
She mentioned sexual abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of a neighbor when she was 14, or “men who came to her aunts’ house” in Algeria.
She settled in France in 2013 but had no stable job or residence.
Encouraged by her drug dealer boyfriend, she turned to prostitution and smoked cannabis.
“Twenty joints a day, it made me feel good,” she said.
After a pause, she started smoking heavily again the week before the crime, she said.
According to a personality assessment seen by AFP, the death of her mother in 2020 had been a “turning point,” with her life beginning to unravel.
She told investigators she had been angry with the girl’s mother, who had refused to give her an entry badge for the building, after her sister had given her a key to her flat.
The probe showed she had conducted searches online into witchcraft days before the murder.
Benkired, whose trial is to last until next Friday, faces a maximum sentence of life in jail.
Ahead of the trial, anti-immigration activists unfurled a banner in front of the courthouse reading “I don’t want to be next.”
Members of extreme-right group, Les Natifs, filmed themselves tagging a nearby pavement with the words “Immigration kills our wives, our mothers and our sisters.”