Four-year-old Kassim Benouali and little brother Sadek, two, died inside a car that may have reached 70C during the scorching heatwave in France
The two young boys who died in a car during the record-breaking heatwave in France have been named.
Four-year-old Kassim Benouali and his younger brother Sadek, two, suffered cardiac arrests after they were trapped inside a car in which temperatures may have reached 70C.
The pair were found unresponsive in the car by their mother Wafa El Boubkari after they had returned home from a swimming trip and a visit to the supermarket in Bois de l’Ubac, Carpentras.
Prosecutors initially suggested the children had ‘locked themselves’ inside the vehicle without their mother’s knowledge. It was later reported that Ms Boubkari told police she had ‘forgotten her children’. A source close to the investigation told AFP the mother gave police several different versions of events.
In her revised statement, the mother said the children got inside the car without her knowing, locked the doors behind them, and became trapped inside, without her knowledge. A manslaughter invesitgation was launched.
The incident has sent shockwaves through the country. Temperatures inside the car may have climbed as high as 70C without any air conditioning on, investigators claim.
Ms Boubkari, who is mother to two other children aged under 10, was reportedly living with her mother at the time of the tragic incident after separating from her husband.
Fatiha, the boys’ grandmother, called it a “huge tragedy,” describing how her daughter and the boys had been for a swim and to the shops before returning home.
“She then drove home with the boys who she left in the car to offload the shopping,” she told the Mail. “It was a genuine mistake, nothing illegal has happened. Everybody has been struggling to focus in this heat, she got busy, and my daughter was also dealing with a lot of other things in her life.”
The two boys were discovered in the white Peugeot at around 1pm. They were in cardiac arrest. Emergency services were called but despite their best efforts it was impossible to resuscitate them.
Ms Boubkari’s sister, who did not want to be named, said: “Wafa hasn’t stopped crying, she’s in a bad way, she’s barely able to speak.”
A preliminary postmortem conducted on Tuesday found that the boys died of dehydration from “exposure to excessive heat”. A funeral for the two youngsters was held on Friday at Carpentras Mosque.
Ms Boubkari spent the first part of this week in hospital with shock. A colleague from the patisserie in Carpentras where Ms Boubkari works said she was “a very nice, hardworking, down to earth woman who was dealing with a lot of things”.
They added: “She’s a very good mother and was doing her best. The pain she is going through must be unimaginable and beyond words. Our hearts go out to her, what has happened is horrific and tragic.”
