A 39-year-old woman is being held in Switzerland after a body was found “severed in two” in France, Swiss authorities said Wednesday.
The French woman, who lives in the Swiss village of Sainte-Croix, was “placed in pre-trial detention following her arrest on November 2 by a border guard patrol,” police in the Vaud canton of western Switzerland said in a statement.
“She is suspected of having set fire to her home and of being involved in the disappearance of her landlord,” police said.
Multiple sources told the AFP news agency Tuesday that a French woman residing in Vaud had been arrested after the discovery on Saturday of a body that had been cut in two in Fedry, a small village in neighboring eastern France.
The sources said the arrested woman had been identified as the tenant in an apartment belonging to a 75-year-old Swiss man, who had been reported missing on Friday.
“You don’t see this every day… I’ve never witnessed anything like this,” the mayor of the village where the remains were found, Jean Roblet, told local news outlet RTL.
Police said formal identification procedures were still taking place, but initial findings suggested the remains “could be the person who disappeared in Sainte-Croix.”
The Swiss border village, where both the suspect and the missing man lived, is around 62 miles from Fedry.
The Vaud police said the woman in custody was under criminal investigation and was suspected of having set fire to her apartment on Sunday. She was arrested by border guards shortly after the blaze and questioned.
“She is also suspected of involvement in the disappearance of her landlord,” police said. “At this stage, she is still presumed innocent.”
The body, which was found on the banks of the River Saone in Fedry, was dressed only in underwear and had been “severed in two at the waist and covered in a white substance,” said Arnaud Grecourt, prosecutor for Haute-Saone’s Vesoul district.
There was “a burn on the back, and several wounds on the skull, on one hand, the neck, and on the torso,” he said.
“Wounds on the hands suggest defensive wounds. Several of the wounds observed point to the use of a sharp instrument,” he continued, according to RTL.
According to initial autopsy results, the victim appeared to have died from bleeding caused by a stab wound to the chest. His body was apparently cut up after death.
The Vaud police said they were working with their French counterparts, and that no further information would be released to this public at the current stage of the investigation.
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