A 29-year-old man was taken into custody after being found on Monday on the A8 motorway rest area in the Var department with the bloodied body of his former partner inside his car, according to Damien Martinelli, the prosecutor of Nice. The body was discovered by customs officers during an unexpected inspection at the Cambarette Nord rest area, near Brignoles (Var), in the afternoon. The body showed signs of injuries caused by a sharp object and was concealed under plastic bags. The driver was placed in custody as part of an investigation launched by the Draguignan prosecutors' office. At the same time, a man in Nice reported to the police that one of his friends, a 25-year-old Brazilian national, had gone missing. The friend had visited the woman’s residence near the Promenade des Anglais in the early afternoon and saw a man leaving with belongings. He noticed the residence had been recently cleaned. Investigators connected the two cases and identified the victim as the missing woman and the driver as her ex-partner. The accused, originally from Savoie and previously convicted for traffic offenses and drug-related violations, was linked to the victim through the investigation. The Draguignan prosecutors' office transferred the case to the Nice prosecutors' office, which launched an investigation for murder by an ex-spouse, assigned to the judicial police of Nice. The body of the young woman showed several traumatic injuries and wounds from a sharp object. An autopsy has been ordered to determine the cause of death. The prosecutor of Nice noted that the victim and the accused had been in a marital relationship. The accused’s detention was extended on Tuesday afternoon. The victim, born in 2001 and of Brazilian nationality, was residing in Nice. Initial investigation findings, especially the identification of the victim, have linked the two cases and suggest the events occurred in Nice before the accused left the city, possibly heading to Savoie, where he is originally from. According to the latest data from the Interministerial Mission for the Protection of Women (Miprof), 107 women were killed by their spouse or ex-spouse in 2024, an 11% increase from the 96 recorded in 2023.