Teen rapist with the cruel mind of a child | World news

Teen rapist with the cruel mind of a child

As they marked off the days on the calendar leading to 13 January 2000, anxiety grew at police headquarters in Lille, where detectives kept a 24-hour telephone listening watch on friends of the suspected three-time killer, Sid Ahmed Rezala.

Two of the murders linked to his name, including that of British student Isabel Peake, were committed on the thirteenth day of the month and his birthday was 13 May 1979. Profilers had told police to expect another murder for 13 January.

Within 48 hours of the fateful date, the breakthrough came when Rezala briefly phoned the mother of his young daughter in the northern city of Amiens, using a false name, but giving a Portuguese number.

Unaware that the public telephone in a run-down Lisbon suburb had been traced, Rezala, 20, walked up to the phonebox at the corner of the Avenue of Freedom at midday on 12 January and was flung against a wall and handcuffed by plainclothes Portuguese police. 'I am Hassan,' he screamed in protest until he recognised two detectives from his home city of Marseilles. 'But they know who I really am,' he mumbled before bursting into tears.

His identity may have been clear, but after a few hours of questioning police were less sure they knew the true character of a good-looking young man who allegedly flung a British girl out of a train at 90mph, killed a mother with 14 knife wounds in a night sleeper and strangled a French student, hiding her naked body under the coal in a cellar.

Orlando Romano, assistant head of the Lisbon CID, said that if the French police had not been there the Portuguese might not have recognised Rezala, whose hair had been cut so short he barely resembled the photo-fit posted in railway stations throughout Europe. What might have thrown police fur ther off the track was that Rezala, feared for his alleged sexual attacks on women, had been protected on the run by a homosexual network that fed, lodged and slept with him.

A rich Spanish businessman, Armando Sánchez, is being questioned about his friendship with Rezala (love at first sight, according to one detective) which began soon after Rezala slipped across the border on 15 December. When police raided Rezala's hideout, his bag was packed and he was carrying a train ticket to Madrid, from where he was due to fly to the Canary Islands with his lover.

Rezala's homosexual past, which included the rape of a 13-year-old boy in Marseilles railway station, is part of one of the most complex criminal person alities to be linked with serial murders in recent years. The man known as the 'night train killer' had so many sides to his character his motives might remain obscure for ever. For the moment, police believe that hatred, after he was ditched by the mother of his daughter in October, triggered off lust for revenge on women in general.

His violent side lived unsuspected under a seductive, smiling presence. He charmed other people, including probation officers and policemen, in a life of crime that started almost as soon as he arrived from his native Algeria at the age of 15 with his parents, three brothers and a sister.

Within weeks of registering at a Marseilles high school, Rezala began playing truant and mixing with petty criminals and drug dealers around the Gare Saint-Charles. His parents asked for him to be sent to a special school, but by autumn he was associating with boy prostitutes. During 18 months in prison for rape he cut his wrists and wrecked his cell in fits of rage. Psychiatrists became alarmed, welfare officer Sylvie Vázquez revealed after the Lisbon arrest. 'He suffered a lot,' she said, and said Rezala 'had kept the violence and cruelty of a child'.

Rezala's interminable journeys by train began in 1997 after another arrest, for stabbing. Ticket inspectors, who fined him 42 times for refusing to pay his fare, became familiar with the introverted traveller in a baseball cap with a supply of cannabis in his backpack and a preference for half-empty, long-distance night trains.

He visited relatives all over France before stopping for a time in Amiens, where he met a young woman called Nadia, who gave birth to his daughter, Sarah Yasmina. But before she was born, Rezala had been arrested again, for robbery with a knife at Marseilles station, and was in jail until June 1999. When he returned to Amiens, Nadia was living with another man. After a brief reconciliation during which neighbours said he looked after his daughter 'like a real father', Nadia suddenly quit him for good.

'That was in October 1999, the month Isabel Peake was murdered,' a Lille detective recalled. 'The break-up with Nadia and the violence that followed are probably not coincidences.'

If that is proved, two other women, Emilie Bazin and Corinne Caillaux, also paid a fatal price for his rejection. And if Rezala had not been so attached to Nadia, he would never have gone to a Lisbon phonebox on the eve of 13 January and stepped into the arms of detectives.

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