{"id":572623,"date":"2026-07-28T20:07:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T20:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/572623\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T20:07:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T20:07:11","slug":"dublin-resident-french-woman-sentenced-to-12-years-over-murder-of-her-daughter-in-iceland-hotel-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/572623\/","title":{"rendered":"Dublin-resident French woman sentenced to 12 years over murder of her daughter in Iceland hotel \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Dublin<\/a>-based French<\/a> woman has been sentenced to 12 years by a court in Iceland<\/a> for the murder of her daughter in June 2025 in a Reykjav\u00edk hotel.<\/p>\n

Ming Ting Mancel (56), who lived in south Dublin, was sentenced by the Reykjav\u00edk District Court during a 10-minute hearing over the killing of her 29-year-old daughter Catherine.<\/p>\n

Mancel\u2019s husband Emeric (57) died in what she claimed during her trial was a botched suicide pact by the three members of the family.<\/p>\n

The French woman had been living in Ireland since 2017 with her husband and daughter before they travelled to Iceland last year. <\/p>\n

They had lived in the Vantage Apartments in Leopardstown close to where Catherine Mancel had worked for online rental platform Airbnb from January 2025. <\/p>\n

\"CatherineCatherine Mancel (29). Photograph: Linkedin <\/p>\n

The family had travelled to Iceland in early June 2025 for what Ming Ting Mancel claimed was a final family holiday before they planned to die by suicide. <\/p>\n

The Mancels stayed for a week at the luxury Reykjav\u00edk Edition Hotel where the bodies of Emeric and Catherine were found on June 14th of last year.<\/p>\n

Ming Ting Mancel was arrested at the scene and charged in April 2026 with the murder of her daughter, in collaboration with her deceased husband. <\/p>\n

Mancel intends to appeal her sentence. <\/p>\n

Her solicitor \u00d3mar \u00d6rn Bjarn\u00fe\u00f3rsson told Icelandic publication Visir that Mancel was \u201cdisappointed\u201d with the verdict and that it was a longer sentence than she expected. <\/p>\n

Ming Ting Mancel left the courtroom after the hearing holding a large Icelandic supermarket bag and a large black rucksack. <\/p>\n

\"MingMing Ting Mancel during her trial in Reykjav\u00edk last month. Photograph: R\u00daV\/Ragnar Visage <\/p>\n

Mancel\u2019s travel ban, imposed upon her since she was released from pretrial detention last September, has now expired since the verdict was delivered. <\/p>\n

Under its terms, her passport had been confiscated and she was not allowed to leave the country. <\/p>\n

She is now free and neither in custody or under the restriction of a travel ban, her solicitor said after Tuesday\u2019s hearing. <\/p>\n

District prosecutor Karl Ingi Vilbergsson confirmed that a request for her detention had been made and that he expected to go before a judge shortly.<\/p>\n

A detailed judgment on the verdict has not yet been published, but is expected in the coming weeks. <\/p>\n

Mancel must now pay the equivalent of more than \u20ac126,000 in legal costs. She has already spent about 12 weeks in custody, which will be deducted from her jail time. <\/p>\n

The district prosecutor had sought the full 16-year sentence permitted under a life sentence for the French woman. Mancel\u2019s solicitor sought a full acquittal or, failing that, a minimum sentence of three years. <\/p>\n

Before living in Ireland, the family were based in New Caledonia, the south Pacific French territory situated about 1,200km off the east coast of Australia. <\/p>\n

During the trial, Ming Ting Mancel had claimed that her husband, who was suffering from advanced kidney disease and was on dialysis, had decided to take his own life due to his illness. <\/p>\n

\"CatherineCatherine Mancel (left) with her father Emeric Mancel (centre) at a Japanese fencing competition in Australia. Photograph: Les Nouvelles Cal\u00e9doniennes <\/p>\n

She contended that the trigger for his suicide was correspondence from his New Caledonia-based sister, who had accused him of stealing the family inheritance of up to \u20ac8 million. <\/p>\n

Mancel said in court that she could not see herself surviving without her husband, and that they had given their daughter Catherine the option of staying alive or joining them in the suicide pact. <\/p>\n

She maintained throughout the trial that her daughter agreed to participate in the suicide pact and had wished to die with her parents. <\/p>\n

The district prosecutor disputed this, arguing that Catherine Mancel had been a \u201cyoung woman in the prime of her life\u201d and that she had been influenced by her parents. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Dublin-based French woman has been sentenced to 12 years by a court in Iceland for the murder…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":572624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[615,1814,62,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-572623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-dublin","tag-france","tag-iceland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=572623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/572624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=572623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=572623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=572623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}