Moroccan boy, 12, saves girl in Normandie lake, ignored as he warns of drowning man who later dies

A 12-year-old Moroccan boy rescued a drowning girl in Normandie’s Lac de Bédanne and directed adults to where her father had disappeared underwater, only to be physically pushed aside, French media reported.

The man’s body was recovered thirty minutes later from the exact spot the boy had indicated, firefighters said.

Hisham was at Lac de Bédanne, a popular leisure site south of Rouen, on the evening of May 27 when he spotted the girl, 11, struggling in the water. He swam out and pulled her to safety while bystanders watched. On the bank, the girl told him her father had gone under nearby.

He alerted security agents and pointed to the location. No one responded. One adult pressed a hand on his head to silence him.

Firefighters recovered the 38-year-old man’s body from a crevasse in the lake bed when they arrived approximately thirty minutes later. A SMUR emergency physician pronounced him dead at the scene.

“I was sad because if they had listened to me, we could have saved him,” Hisham told actu.fr, which first reported the incident.

Bédanne is a former Seine quarry, with irregular depths dropping suddenly to seven metres, poor visibility, and obscuring vegetation.

A similar drowning occurred there in the summer of 2024. Firefighter Benoît Ster of the SDIS 76, in a statement to french outlet France 3 Normandie, warned that in hot weather, people tend to overestimate their ability to swim, or to rescue someone else in difficulty.

The site was closed in the immediate aftermath before reopening on May 30 with a supervised swimming area.

Mayor Agnès Cercel, quoted by France 3 Normandie, said: “It’s terrible. There is signage everywhere, the site staff warn people, and despite all that they still swim. I understand that people want to cool off in this heat. But you have to be very careful.”