French police have found several clues in the discovery of the decapitated head and body parts of a mystery woman in a Paris park.
Buttes Chaumont - which is renowned as a crime film set - was shut off Tuesday after the discovery of at least two bags containing flesh and bones of a "European or North African" woman.
In their investigation, police said the woman was still clothed in blue jeans emblazoned with a floral decoration when she was dismembered.
"The first bag was found on Monday in an area used by park workers to dump waste," said an investigating source.
"It was hidden under a pile of leaves, and inside was a section of body cut from below the chest to the knees."
Police were called, and by late afternoon on Monday a full-scale search involving forensics officers had been launched.
By Tuesday morning, the woman’s dismembered head was found at the end of a disused railway line in the park.
Detectives established that the woman had been dressed in blue jeans with floral decoration at the level of the right thigh.
She was a "European or North African," another source told Le Parisien news outlet.
"Neither her age, size or build could yet be determined."
She was a "European or North African," another source told Le Parisien news outlet. ‘Neither her age, size or build could yet be determined.’
Paris prosecutors confirmed that a "murder enquiry" had been opened, with a spokesman saying: "The corpse was not in a state of putrefaction, which seems to attest to a recent death."
The spokesman said that an autopsy would be opened on Tuesday night, and in the meantime thousands of hours of CCTV film shot around the park were being studied for clues.
Buttes-Chaumont, which means ‘bald hill,’ was for three centuries up until 1760 a place where the bodies of hanged criminals were displayed after execution.
It was turned into a park in the 1860s, and filled with romantic follies including a Temple of Sibylle, an imitation Temple of Vesta, perched on a small cliff above an artificial lake.
Movies filmed in the park range from the Marseille Contract (1974) to The Murderous Corpse (1913)
The discovery of the body parts comes four months after the abduction and murder of a 12-year-old girl close to the Buttes-Chaumont.
The lifeless body of Lola Daviet was found last October squeezed into a suitcase in a street adjoining the park.
She had been sexually assaulted and murdered after school in a crime branded as ‘pure evil’ by French President Emmanuel Macron.
