Harsher sentences than in the first instance. The Bouches-du-Rhône Court of Appeal sentenced, on the night of Friday to Saturday, Mohamed Seghier, 46, and Juan-Gino Marti, 42, to thirty years of criminal imprisonment for the organized gang murder of rapper Jul’s manager in 2014.
The appeals jury thus increased the twenty-five-year prison sentence imposed on them in March 2023. The two defendants fiercely denied their participation in the assassination of Karim Tir, 30, shot dead at the wheel of his vehicle by men riding a motorbike in front of a metro station on June 12, 2014, in Asnières-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine).
Reconverted to music production after drugs
“I am a car thief, I could have carried out a robbery but I am not a killer,” insisted Mohamed Seghier during the debates, presented by the judicial police as one of the influential members of a team of criminals from Marignane (Bouches-du-Rhône), a town near Marseille.
Karim Tir, released from prison two years earlier after serving a five-year sentence for drug trafficking, had turned to music production, becoming manager of Jul, whose career was beginning to take off.
“Vendetta”
Attorney General Christophe Raffin, who had requested thirty years of imprisonment for the two accused, included this assassination in a “vendetta”, a bloody conflict between two Marseille criminal teams involved in drug trafficking.
Detailing the circumstances of the assassination of Karim Tir, the first assize court, in March 2023, had considered that “the shooter who appears limping on the surveillance camera images can only be Zakary Remadnia”, a young man shot dead a few months later in Marseille.
Mohamed Seghier had previously dropped him off at the scene. The first instance assize court also named Juan Marti as the very experienced driver of the motorcycle carrying the shooter after the shots, a role contested by Messrs. Anna-Maria Sollacaro and Antoine Guglielmi who called for his acquittal.
Jul fined for refusing to appear
Mohamed Seghier’s lawyers, Pascal Roubaud and Mehdi Khezami, also argued for acquittal. “The proceedings did not allow us to say where Mohamed Seghier was at the crime scene,” said Roubaud after the verdict, regretting that “the court convicted without being able to determine the exact role” of his client.
A third defendant was sentenced to four years in prison, two of which were suspended, for criminal conspiracy, even though he had been acquitted at first instance. Marseille rap star Jul will have to pay a fine of 3,000 euros for refusing to appear as a witness during this appeal trial.
