the essential
Julien, a young man from Toulouse in his twenties, is suspected of having participated in the murder of a man near Girona, Spain. He is the subject of an international arrest warrant. The investigating chamber of the Toulouse Court of Appeal must validate or not his extradition.
“I admit that I am the subject of an international arrest warrant. I was scared because I don’t speak Spanish,” explains Julien, feverishly (1).
Behind his long blond hair, his youthful face and his student appearance, hides a man suspected of murder. The mossos, the Spanish police, showed up at his home on June 24 to question him about a murder. But this Haut-Garonnais, aged about twenty, refused his extradition. The decision to extradite him or not to the Spanish authorities now rests with the investigating chamber of the Toulouse Court of Appeal. “I reacted like a child. It was panic that conditioned everything,” he continues timidly.
“I came to buy cannabis”
His life changed on March 10, 2023. That day, Julien called twice one of his contacts, who lived in Cantallops, in the province of Girona in Spain. “I admit it, it was to buy a packet of cannabis,” he confessed, before apologizing.
The meeting is set at a house. The surveillance cameras of this town show his car parking in front of this house. According to these images, Julien gets out of his car, goes inside the house. He stays there for a few minutes and comes out, visibly terrified. Julien then climbs into his vehicle and gets back on the road, very quickly.
A few hours later, a body was discovered in the house by the victim’s relatives. The 36-year-old man, originally from Morocco, had been shot in the chest. His body was lying in a pool of blood. “The Spanish prosecutor immediately opened an investigation for murder,” said an adviser to the investigating chamber.
He lives normally for more than a year
For many months, this young man with a very thin face certainly believed himself to be out of the question. He even found a job in the west of Toulouse to lead a “normal” life. A brief interlude. More than a year after the events, the investigation by the Catalan authorities finally allowed them to identify two Frenchmen: Julien and a man in his thirties from Montpellier. Their respective vehicles were filmed in front of the property in the hours preceding the murder.
“He went in to buy drugs and saw blood. Then he smelled a foul odor. Usually, we call the emergency services, but he feared the worst. He was afraid of being mistaken for the killer,” explains Laurent Nakache-Haarfi, Julien’s counsel. The lawyer cannot imagine his client, who has a clean record, in the shoes of a killer. “The Spanish justice system simply wants to question him to understand his role in this case. He has nothing to do with this murder,” says Nakache-Haarfi.
In order to ensure this, the attorney general of the investigating chamber (CHINST) of the Toulouse Court of Appeal has requested his extradition. “Our neighbors have the right to know what he was doing there,” said the representative of the public prosecutor. Julien will know by next Tuesday whether he must surrender to the Spanish authorities or not. The decision is now in the hands of the president of the CHINST. (1) first name changed
