Amélie Delagrange's mum has said the French exchange student's murder tore her family's world apart.

Levi Bellfield, 39, was today convicted of murdering 22-year-old Amélie on Twickenham Green in August 2004.

Amélie's mum, Dominique Delagrange, said: "Our world fell apart on August 19, 2004 when the police came to see us when we had just come back from work.

"The shock was terrible. They came in showing us their police badges. They informed us that Amélie had been assaulted and was dead.

"I could not understand what was happening. I wanted to yell that it should all stop. For me, Amélie was the last person to whom anyone could do such a thing, that a man should lay a hand on her."

Amélie's dad, Jean-François, suffered a heart attack less than a year after his daughter was bludgeoned to death by the former bouncer.

After the three weeks it took for her daughter's body to be released, she said: "Amélie's body was flown back to France just like a parcel and this was even more painful."

Amélie's mum, a secretary, and dad, an architect, sat in court nearly every day of Bellfield's three-and-a-half month trial, listening attentively to each word spoken by their French translator.

When Amélie's belongings were brought back in suitcases two months after her death, Dominique said she "cried a lot seeing them arrive without her" and could only bring herself to open them up over a year later, "when we had to travel and we thought that by using her suitcases, it would be as if she was with us".

She explained Amélie's very close extended family was "so reluctant to accept her death that her grave is in reality a little garden always covered in flowers and grass".

Teresa Rubina, Amélie's manager at Maison Blanc, the patisserie café in Richmond where Amélie worked for three months, said she was "the one who was always smiling, a helpful and hard worker who never complained."

"Amélie had a warm nature, she was loved by all, she loved to laugh and joke. She was always loving, always smiling and we could not be any closer. We laughed a lot together," Dominique added.