the essential
The trial of the attempted murders in Izards is approaching the verdict before the Haute-Garonne Assize Court. Surprise this Monday morning: Abdelkader H., one of the main accused, admitted to being one of the shooters. A progress which does not resolve all the questions.
Faced with the jurors, they held their ground. The questions and the evidence had no effect on these defendants. The inconsistencies in the explanations for the bursts of automatic weapons released this Sunday, March 17, 2019, in the Izards district of Toulouse do not matter. At least until this Monday morning when, before the Haute-Garonne Assize Court, Abdelkader H. spoke: “I have lied until now. It was really me who shot this morning -there”.
An about-face from this force of nature, 25 years old at the end of the month, against whom the evidence had been accumulating since his arrest, traces of DNA on cartridge cases until his recognition by a witness – “Two years afterwards”, notes, not convinced, his lawyer Me Alexandre Martin, surprised like the court by his confession.
Accomplices? One dead, one missing
And with whom? The other defendants? “No. I was with Oucem Z. and Amin S.”
Surprise for the co-defendants, the general counsel and the president but also the defense lawyers who were not prepared for this surge of truth. Oucem, a great friend of the accused, “his almost brother”, specifies Abdelkader's other lawyer, Me Edouard Martial, died six weeks after the shootings of March 17. Executed with a bullet in the head probably by a member of the opposite camp.
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As for Amin S., implicated by the investigation, he benefited from a dismissal of the case. He has since disappeared. And the checks at his last home carried out hastily this Monday by the gendarmes yielded nothing. “He hasn’t lived there for 18 months,” warns president Valérie Noël, disappointed if not surprised.
What do you think of these revelations? Me Simon Cohen hesitates between “an act of truth but perhaps also a maneuver”. “Tricky in any case not to hear what this suspect who is still alive can tell us.” Advocate General Virginie Audebert, skeptical, discerns “nothing new”. She doesn't want to hear about a dismissal. The defense is ironic but it is stuck between “confessions which are not nothing”, insists Mr. Martial and an accused “who wants to see his trial through to the end”, warns Mr. Martin.
Victims not to be neglected
The court did not think long. Reading the interviews with the missing suspect and his confrontation during the investigation is enough to inform the jurors, two women and four men who are always attentive. Me Cohen took the opportunity to be surprised: “Your cousins are in prison, one for 5 years, and that doesn’t matter to you?” Abdelkader does not flinch. Mehdi and Aymen stammer, unconvincing.
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Attempted assassinations in Izards: “I don't know any enemy, it's necessarily a mistake”, at the assizes, the victims testified
My Sarah Nabet-Claverie and Simon Cohen spoke at the end of the afternoon to defend the two victims of this ambush. “There are no sub-victims”, explains Me Nabet-Claverie, in an intelligent defense of a boy from the neighborhood “neither there to accuse, nor to excuse”. And Me Simon Cohen, anxious not to turn his client “into the star of the deal” denounces: “That morning, they wanted to kill. The number of shots, the aim, the means, the weapons of war, used. They wanted to kill because they had a score to settle.”
Indictment and closing arguments by defense lawyers are scheduled for Tuesday.
