Abdellatif Z., 65, had appealed after being sentenced to fifteen years in prison by the Bouches-du-Rhône Assize Court in March 2023. His sentence is a relief for the singer and her two daughters.
The ex-husband of singer Souad Massi was sentenced Friday to 11 years in prison by the Var Assize Court of Appeal for having attempted to murder their two daughters in 2017 while trying to commit suicide, we learned from the court and lawyers. Abdellatif Z., 65, had appealed after being sentenced to 15 years in prison by the Bouches-du-Rhône Assize Court in March 2023. During both trials, the attorney general had requested 20 years in prison.
On March 22, 2017, Souad Massi, while traveling, received a phone call from the accused, with whom she was in the process of divorcing, warning her that she was going to “understand the meaning of the word ‘suffer'”. Worried, she immediately alerted the firefighters who found the accused and the two girls, then aged 6 and 11, unconscious in their house in Bouc-Bel-Air, between Aix-en-Provence and Marseille, at the last minute. He had given the children medication and then placed them in a sealed room where he had opened a gas bottle, before spreading 40 litres of fuel in the house which had not caught fire when he had thrown a lit cigarette into it.
The condemnation “of course takes into account the suffering of the civil parties but it also says that this gesture was not an act of revenge against the mother of the children but the act of a desperate man who was recognised as having a significant impairment of discernment”the defense lawyers said. During both trials, they highlighted the deep depression in which the accused was then plunged, who explained that he wanted to kill himself and take his daughters with him rather than abandon them. “It was the gesture of a sick and desperate father. He hopes that this message will pass through the years.”explained Me Jean Boudot.
This is not at all the case for the moment: “This new trial has been very trying” for Souad Massi and her daughters, aged 14 and 19, declared their lawyer, Me Olinka Malaterre. “They are devastated and have experienced it as a new trauma,” adds the singer’s lawyer. Despite everything, this definitive condemnation “is a relief for the civil parties and the beginning, finally, of their reconstruction”she added.
