A grandmother and a mother were sentenced on Friday, March 6, 2026, in Dijon, Côte-d’Or, to ten and six years in prison respectively for abandoning premature babies in a shopping bag, resulting in the death of one of them.
The verdict is in. On Friday, March 6, 2026, 26-year-old Sabrina Boulsas and her 44-year-old mother, Zara Nacir (formerly Christelle Balloux), were sentenced to six and 10 years in prison, respectively, for abandoning their two children in a shopping bag, resulting in the death of one of them.
The Côte-d’Or assize court ruled that the defendants “failed to provide the necessary care” to the twins whom Sabrina, then 20, gave birth to prematurely on the night of May 23-24, 2020.
The jury, however, dismissed the charges of “murder and attempted murder.” Instead, they opted for “deprivation of care resulting in death” or “endangerment to health” – one of the two infants survived, explained Presiding Judge Anne-Sophie Martinet. The jury also found it a mitigating factor in Sabrina Boulsas’s case that she lived in “proven fear of the reaction of her adoptive father,” who had strict religious principles. However, the courts were more severe towards Zara Nacir, who was 38 years old at the time of the incident and “did not mention the existence of the children” she knew were alive, neither to paramedics nor after they arrived at the hospital for an alleged “miscarriage.” Prosecutor David Dufour had requested a sentence of 15 years in prison for Nacir and six years for Sabrina for murder and attempted murder.
Grandmother was afraid of her “aggressive partner.”
For the record, Sabrina Boulsas gave birth to two children, much to her surprise, but she removed them—one from the toilet bowl, where she thought she was having a bowel movement, and the other from the bathtub. She then “wrapped them in her own clothes, even though she was suffering and cold,” her lawyer, Chloé Bonnat, testified during the trial. “And that would be a crime? I consider it an act of love,” she continued. Zara Nacir, on the other hand, completely wrapped the children “so they couldn’t breathe,” then placed them in a bag, which was then placed in a plastic bag.
She told her daughter to “get rid of the children” out of “shame and fear of losing her partner,” an abusive man from whom she wanted to hide the birth. She decided to call the fire department “over an hour” after giving birth, despite the urgent need to help the two infants, who weighed less than 800 grams. Upon arrival, the grandmother asked them to “not speak too loudly” because her partner was unaware of the pregnancy. The prosecutor argued that the mother of the twins lacked the strength to refuse because she was “under her mother’s control” at the time. Didier Pascaud, a lawyer from the Côte-d’Or department representing the civil party in the case, claimed that the children “were treated like garbage.”