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.