Minimum 30 years for twisted pair who tortured and murdered nanny
A COUPLE have each been jailed for at least 30 years for torturing their French nanny to death and burning her body on a bonfire.
Sabrina Kouider and Ouissem Medouni murdered 21-year-old Sophie Lionnet in London after becoming obsessed with the idea that she was plotting with Boyzone’s founding member Mark Walton to abuse people.
Over more than eight hours of interrogations, the au pair was slapped, likened to a Nazi collaborator and called “worse than a murderer” by the couple.
They confiscated her identity card and phone and in her final days, Sophie was hit with an electrical cable and beaten so badly she had five fractured ribs and a cracked breast bone.
Kouider and Medouni finally tortured and killed her in the bath before flinging her body on to a bonfire in their garden in Wimbledon in September.
At the Old Bailey yesterday, Judge Nicholas Hilliard QC jailed the pair for life and told them: “Sophie was a kind, gentle and good- natured girl. You were both involved in torturing Sophie in the bath in the lead-up to her death in making her think she would drown.
“The suffering and the torture you put her through before her death was prolonged and without pity.”
The judge described Kouider, 35, as “vindictive and overbearing”. He said Medouni, 40, was “timid.”
At an earlier trial, the couple admitted trying to pervert the course of justice but denied murder.
Judge Hilliard said the couple’s idea about Sophie being in a plot with Mark was a “complete fiction”.
After they killed Sophie, they tried to frame the former star.
Sophie’s mum Catherine Devallonne said: “Those monsters repeatedly beat Sophie. They starved, tortured and broke her.
“Her life painfully ebbed away until Sophie struggled to take her final terrified breath in the bath.”
Kouider wrote a letter that was read to the court. Apologising to Sophie, she wrote that she was “sad that you are not part of this world”.