Supermodel found dead in Paris

French police have confirmed that a supermodel has been found dead near the Garigliano bridge in the River Seine.

Police said the body of Katoucha Niane, 47, who was from Guinea and based in France, was found yesterday. She disappeared in January.

Dectetives are investigating the possibility she fell into the river when she returned home to her houseboat, moored on the Seine near the Alexandre III bridge, after a party. There is no sign of foul play.

Niane, known as Katoucha, was the face of Yves Saint Laurent, the French haute couture guru, in the 1980s before leaving modelling to launch a campaign against female genital mutilation.

She was nicknamed the Peul princess after the Peul ethnic group of Guinea and eight other west African states.

Katoucha told Associated Press in 1994 she ran away to Europe at the age of 17 to be a model.

Her big break came when Jules-François Crahay, then the designer at Lanvin, spotted her in a line-up. The label hired her as a fitting model. She started on the catwalk for Thierry Mugler in the 1980s.

She said her father, Djibril Tamsir Niane, an archaeologist and writer, was initially disappointed she did not become "a professional intellectual, with a university degree", but was later reconciled to her other successes.

Katoucha set up her own label in 1994. The singers Cher and Johnny Hallyday were among the stars who attended her shows.

"I don't pretend to be like Lacroix, Saint Laurent or the others," she said then. "But I was certainly in a great school by wearing their clothes and going to the fittings. I learned several basic lessons, including: Don't cut the fabric until you've got the 'toile' [heavy linen prototype] just right."

In a book last year, Katoucha, In My Flesh, the model described how she was genitally mutilated at the age of nine.

"I will never get the incomparable pain out of my head," she wrote.

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