A 32-year-old man has been charged with assassinat — premeditated murder under French law — in the death of French TikTok influencer Sonia Bellina and placed in pre-trial detention, the Nîmes Public Prosecutor’s Office announced on August 21, 2026. A second man arrested with him two days earlier was released from custody the day before that, after investigators could not establish his involvement. Bellina, 29, was found dead on August 12, her body partially burned, in a vineyard in Saint-Gilles, in the south of France.
The prosecutor’s office said the evidence had not, at that stage, established the released man’s involvement in what happened, and that a weapon seized during a search of his home was unconnected to the case and is being handled as a separate matter. The other man’s custody was extended on August 20 before he was brought before an investigating magistrate the following day and charged.
Those arrests came August 19, when officers from the Nîmes criminal investigation unit detained the pair. In its release that day, the prosecutor’s office said it was holding the two because evidence suggested they were involved, directly or indirectly, in what happened to Bellina. Authorities have said little else about where the inquiry is heading.
A Body Found in a Vineyard
The case began among the vines. On August 12, a partially burned body was found in a vineyard in Saint-Gilles, a commune in France’s Gard department, west of the Rhône. The prosecutor’s office said a murder investigation was opened immediately, and that an autopsy would be carried out the following day, August 13.
Those autopsy findings have not been released. Prosecutors have not publicly described how Bellina died, nor have they disclosed what led investigators to the two men detained a week later.
The remains were identified as Bellina on August 19 through DNA analysis, the prosecutor’s office said. The file is being handled by the Nîmes public prosecutor, Cécile Gensac, with law enforcement agencies across southern France involved in the continuing inquiry.
A Sister’s Account of the Disappearance
Days before the arrests, a woman who identified herself as Bellina’s sister went live on TikTok on August 17 and spoke with the regional outlet Midi Libre. She said the influencer had vanished on August 10, leaving home for the evening and never returning.
“She said she was going out one evening, but she never came home,” her sister said.
The sister said the body was later found in Saint-Gilles. She also described a second ordeal running alongside the first: a wave of hostility aimed at the family online. Among the messages, she said, were remarks claiming that Bellina had deserved her fate — comments posted while relatives were still absorbing the news that a young woman they loved had been found dead in a field.
Family Lawyer Warns Against Online Abuse
Mourad Battikh, a lawyer representing Bellina’s family, responded to the abusive posts by saying he would let nothing pass unchallenged, while asking the public to leave the family alone. In a press release, Battikh said the relatives were living through an extremely violent ordeal, asked that their privacy and their grief be respected, and said they would not comment further.
The dual pressure — a criminal investigation and a public one conducted in comment sections — has become a familiar burden for the families of people who lived part of their lives online. Bellina built an audience of more than 250,000 followers on TikTok, posting videos of herself dancing, singing karaoke and lip-syncing alongside clips about fashion and relationships — the kind of low-stakes, high-volume content that can turn a private person into a recognizable face across a region and beyond.
What Investigators Have Not Said
Much about the case remains unstated by authorities. The prosecutor’s office has not published the results of the August 13 autopsy, has not identified either of the men taken into custody August 19, and has not laid out a sequence of events between Bellina’s disappearance and the discovery of her body. Under French procedure, police custody can be extended with judicial approval, as it was for the remaining suspect before he was charged on August 21. A mise en examen places a suspect formally under investigation; it is not a conviction.
What is established is the shape of the timeline itself: a young woman who told her family she was heading out on the evening of August 10; a partially burned body found among the vines outside Saint-Gilles on August 12; an autopsy the next day; a public appeal by a grieving sister on August 17; two arrests on August 19; on August 20, one man walking free while the other’s custody was extended; and on August 21, an assassinat charge against the man who remained.
The investigation is being run out of Nîmes with the involvement of law enforcement agencies in southern France. As of August 23, the case stood where the prosecutor’s August 21 announcement left it — one man charged and remanded, one released without charge, and a family that has asked, through its lawyer, to be allowed to mourn in private.