Serial killer of rabbits French Village

A troubled apparently a serial killer of rabbits has struck fear into the hearts of the people of a picturesque French village on the north Brittany coast.

More than 100 animals have fallen victim to the mystery killer since he or she began their murderous spree in and around the village of Minihy-Tréguier, a pretty spot popular with tourists and home to a handful of British expats.

“The village is gripped by fear,” Jean-Yves Fenvarc’h, the mayor of the village of 1,300 people, told the Telegraph.

The killer sneaks into people’s gardens, removes the rabbits from their hutches, kills them with a sharp object or by simply crushing them with his foot, and then leaves their dead bodies where they died.

“I surprised him one morning around 9:30 a.m.but he had the time to make his escape,” she told Ouest-France newspaper.

“I went to the police station to report the incident. It was there that I learnt that this was not an isolated case,” she said.

The man was described as wearing a long raincoat and a black hat.

The mayor of Minihy-Tréguier said he is mystified as to who the killer might be.

“It’s hard to think it could be someone from the village. I really can’t think of anyone here who would do such things,” said Mr Fenvarc’h, although he admitted the attacker appeared to have very good local knowledge if he was able to so easily identify houses that had rabbit hutches.

He said that many worried villagers had come to him to seek assurance that police were allocating the necessary resources to finding and arresting the serial killer.

“They’re afraid they might bump into him and don’t know what sort of reaction he might have,” he said.

The case has echoes of the Croydon Cat Killer saga, in which a serial killer was suspected of murdering hundreds of cats in Croydon and other parts of the London area.

That case was closed last month when police concluded that most of the dead cats had been hit by cars and then partly eaten by foxes.

The rabbits he kills are often kept by elderly people who house them in their gardens, sometimes alongside chickens or geese.

“He (the killer) never touches the chickens or the geese,” said Mr Fenvarc’h.

The mayor said the attacks, which now number 15 in total, began in March, then eased off before starting again in August, and then, after another lull, resumed earlier this month.

What makes the situation particularly scary, he said, was the fact that the killer sometimes returns to the scene of a crime to kill again.

Police have appealed for witnesses to try and catch the killer.

“The hutches are opened, then the animals are coldly killed and left on the spot,” the local gendarmes said in a post to their Facebook page asking people to help them track down the slayer.

There has been only one reported sighting of the rabbit slayer.

Sylvie Corlouer lives in the nearby village of Langoat, and has lost six adult rabbits to the attacker, two of whom were females who had just given birth and whose babies subsequently died.