A French court on Thursday sentenced a 42-year-old Algerian nanny to two and a half years in prison for poisoning the parents of Jewish children under her care, but ruled out antisemitism as an aggravating factor, AFP reported.
The nanny, employed by the family to care for their three young children, was accused of contaminating several household items in 2024. The parents filed a complaint in January after discovering that a bottle of grape juice smelled of bleach and that the mother’s eye makeup remover caused painful eye irritation.
During police questioning, the nanny admitted to pouring cleaning products into bottles of alcohol belonging to her employers. At the time, she told officers she “never should have worked for a Jewish woman.”
However, during her trial at the court in Nanterre, near Paris, she retracted her statement, claiming she had invented the confession under police pressure and denied any antisemitic motive.
In delivering the sentence, the presiding judge described the act as a “major betrayal of trust” toward the parents of the then 2-, 5-, and 7-year-old children. The court nonetheless rejected the aggravating circumstance of antisemitism on procedural grounds, stating that the defendant’s remarks were made later in the investigation and not in the presence of her lawyer.
The court also found the nanny guilty of using a forged Belgian identity card.
In addition to her prison sentence, the court banned the defendant from French territory for five years.