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French police found yesterday
the body of the former top model Katoucha Niane in the River Seine. The model
had been missing since January 31. She was living in a houseboat moored near
the Alexander III bridge in central Paris.
Apparently she was coming back
late at night from a party. The 47-year-old woman might have accidentally
fallen into the river as she had allegedly been drinking quite a lot at the
party, The Times reports. Police say that the autopsy did not show any signs of
foul play.
”She fell into the water and went
straight to the bottom,” a source close to the investigation said.
At first it was believed that she
committed suicide, after her bag had been found by the front door to her boat.
But additional investigation established that the former supermodel must have
lost her balance and slipped into the river accidentally.
Katoucha was one of the first
African women to become famous on the catwalk. She was Yves Saint-Laurent’s
muse in the 1980s. Subsequently she gave up modeling and started a campaign
against female genital mutilation.
In a book released last year, “In
My Flesh,” Katoucha wrote about her own painful experience, describing how she
was genitally mutilated at the age of nine: "I will never get the
incomparable pain out of my head.”
She launched a foundation against
female circumcision. She said her successful career as a top model should be
considered as a “revenge” for the horrible mutilation she had underwent.
“I embodied the most arrogant and
admired kind of femininity, I who was supposed to be diminished,” she wrote.
Katoucha was born in Guinea, and at age of 17 she ran away to Europe to become a model, she told the Associated Press in
1994. She is the mother of three children. Katoucha was named the Peu Princess
after the ethnic group of Guinea
and eight other West African states.
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