Pressure grew on President Emmanuel Macron of France on Wednesday after the suspect in the killing of a 12-year-old girl in Paris last week was identified as an Algerian woman who had been ordered to leave the country, fuelling Right-wing accusations that Macron’s immigration policies were partly to blame.

The bruised body of the girl, identified by French authorities by her first name, Lola, was found on Friday in a plastic trunk in a courtyard of her apartment building in northeastern Paris.

Her parents, superintendents for their building, had reported her missing after she failed to return from school. An autopsy later showed that Lola had died of asphyxiation, but her body had cuts in several places, including her face and neck.

National shock over the killing quickly led to political recriminations against Macron after the authorities identified the main suspect as a 24-year-old Algerian woman who had been in France illegally for the past three years.

That she had been ordered to leave the country in August shifted the focus to France’s sluggish deportation process.

New York Times News Service