The mother and maternal grandfather of Lynn Taleb, who passed away at the age of five after being repeatedly raped, have been arrested three weeks after the little girl’s death.
The investigation on the two family members is ongoing, and the case has been transferred to North Lebanon First Investigating Judge Samaranda Nassar.
This follows an initial inquiry led by prosecutor Matilda Touma, who found the two aforementioned individuals guilty and demanded that DNA testing be performed on both the paternal and maternal sides of the little girl’s family.
Amer Taleb, Lynn’s father’s cousin, claimed that there is still insufficient proof to establish the grandfather’s involvement in the sexual assaults against the victim. Nevertheless, in an interview with This Is Beirut, Taleb commented that “the judge wouldn’t have ordered the arrest of an innocent person and must have based her decision on specific evidence.”
According to Taleb, the doctor’s reports do not exclude the grandfather’s responsibility. As for the mother, “she would rather stifle the scandal because unless a mother has psychological disorders, it is unimaginable for her to cause harm to her own daughter,” he asserted.
“Lynn asked her father, Omar Taleb, to let her spend the Adha holiday with her mother, Waad Bou Khalil, in Tripoli,” Amer recalled. She was dropped off there on June 19. Nobody anticipated that this would happen because Lynn’s paternal relatives had never detected any weird behavior from Lynn during her prior visits with the Bou Khalil family.
“If what the mother says is true, and her daughter seemed terrified when she arrived at her home on June 19, she could have contacted us to ask for an explanation, which she did not do,” Taleb commented.
Lynn was brought to the governmental hospital ten days later, after spending ten hours vomiting and refusing to eat or drink. The little girl died after hospitalization and examination.
The forensic doctor, whose presence was requested by Prosecutor Touma, revealed the fact that Lynn had been raped. The two families have been trading allegations ever since.
