The courts on Thursday sentenced a forty-year-old tried in Lyon for “concealment of a corpse” to twenty-two months in prison, twenty-three years after the murder committed by his father in 2001, at the origin of the case but prescribed.
In rendering the decision, the president of the criminal court explained that the judgment takes into account “a slight attenuation of discernment at the time of the facts”. This explains a sentence slightly lower than the legal maximum of two years that the prosecutor requested at the hearing on October 8.
When justice apologizes to the victims
The sentence remains significant given “the seriousness of the offense, its duration of fifteen years, and the context,” said the president of the court. “My dismay is nothing compared to your anger,” declared prosecutor Alain Grellet at the hearing, addressing the family of the victim of an extraordinary case.
The magistrate had presented “the apologies of the judicial institution” due to the flaws in the procedure, in particular the loss of the family’s complaint in the judicial archives which had caused the crime to be prescribed at the end of a procedure with twists and turns . The family said they were “relieved” after the judgment. “The words of the prosecutor did us good, the judgment is correct,” said Rachida Abdelhadi, the victim’s sister. The family had increased their searches and filed a complaint for “disturbing disappearance”, after the disappearance of Mohamed Abdelhadi, 27, on December 9, 2001 in Villefranche-sur-Saône.
The corpse buried in a wood
In 2015, the case rebounded. A young woman, victim of domestic violence, accused a man of having, with the help of her two sons, killed the twenty-year-old. Placed in police custody, the father admitted to having stabbed the young man because of the theft of a disk player, in the context of drug addiction. The two sons confirmed the scene, specifying that the body had been buried in a wood, where the corpse was finally found in 2016.
After the statute of limitations for the murder, the youngest son found himself alone at the bar of the criminal court to answer for the concealment of a corpse, an offense not prescribed. Summoned as a witness, his father did not appear at the hearing. “I remained paralyzed. I couldn’t believe it. I did what he asked me to do,” explained the defendant, describing a very violent father and a degraded family context which favored his addiction to narcotics.
