By Le Figaro with AFP
Published
1 hour ago,
updated at 12:29 p.m.
Well known in Lyon, Abdel Karim Touil was sentenced to 15 years in prison for cocaine trafficking between France and Brazil last week.
Le Figaro Lyon
The end of a police and legal saga lasting several years for a major Lyon drug trafficker. Nicknamed “The Professor”, Abdel Karim Touil was sentenced to 15 years in prison for cocaine trafficking by the Bordeaux court last week. Arrested in March in Lebanon and extradited to France at the end of July, he was prosecuted for having participated in the importation of more than 730 kilos of cocaine from Brazil in January 2020.
The drug, hidden in a cargo of wood, was to be delivered to Montluçon, in the Allier department. Landed in Antwerp (Belgium) then transported by truck, it landed by mistake in a company located in a small town in Gironde.
Flight to the United Arab Emirates
Presented as an intermediary between the owners of the goods and the buyers, Abdel Karim Touil had fled to the United Arab Emirates. He invested in real estate, buying apartments worth several million euros according to a recent newspaper investigation. The World .
He was sentenced in absentia in October 2023 to a twelve-year sentence in the same case. He had become one of Ofast's priority targets. “The Professor” was the subject of an arrest warrant issued by France, via an Interpol red notice.
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French of Tunisian origin, he was arrested in possession of an Algerian passport in Dubai at the start of the year and then released. The man, now 38 years old, was eventually arrested in Beirut, Lebanon in March, then extradited to France. Now aged 38, he appealed the first Bordeaux judgment. He was therefore retried, receiving a heavier sentence in the process.
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