More than 20 years after the macabre discovery, in 2003 in a ditch along a road in Meurthe-et-Moselle, of the body of a 29-year-old man, two men accused of “sequestration followed by death” are on trial from Monday in Nancy.
The two accused, aged 52 and 40, of Romanian nationality, are accused of “arbitrary arrest, kidnapping or detention followed by death” and will be tried until Thursday by the Assize Court of Meurthe-et-Moselle, a year and a half after their arrest in Spain which ended a long run.
Convicted by default in 2011
The two men had already been sentenced in absentia and in their absence in 2011 to 30 and 26 years of imprisonment for their role in the death of Philippe Charuel, whose body, badly beaten, was found in a road ditch departmental in Gondreville, a town located a few kilometers from Nancy, on February 20, 2003.
Philippe Charuel, who was a sales executive looking for work at the time of the events, lived a few kilometers away, in Toul. He was described as “a man without fuss” who frequented nightclubs, recently separated from his wife and father of a young child. His car was found stained with blood in downtown Nancy.
-Defendants “involved in pimping”
The two fugitives, “involved in pimping”, according to the Spanish police, were arrested on 1is and August 2, 2023 in the Catalan towns of Segur de Calafell and El Prat de Llobregat, near Barcelona. They had been living in Catalonia for around twenty years, under a false identity.
In this case, two young Romanian prostitutes declared that they had been bothered by Philippe Charuel, who was then taken into a car by two men, whom they said they did not know. The investigation showed that the two accused, an uncle and his nephew, were the pimps of the two women.
