It is 10:15 p.m. on August 2, 2018, when the Montpellier gendarmes arrive at the home of Abderrahmane Khalid. This 79-year-old man is waiting for the soldiers he called in front of the family home, in Villemagne-l’Argentière in the Hérault. Spontaneously, he tells them that he killed his wife, Akila, the mother of his three daughters. At the back of the garage, the body of this 73-year-old woman lies on the ground in a pool of blood. The victim has a swollen face. The gendarmes quickly find the murder weapon, a spade which is placed against a wall. Placed in police custody, this former driver confides to the investigators that he hit her several times in the head, after yet another argument. He insists that he had “lost his mind” and that at the time of the events, “the demon had taken him”.
Four years later, Abderrahmane Khalid, now 83, is on trial from Wednesday before the Hérault Assize Court for the murder of his wife. The daughters of the couple hope that the lawsuit will make it possible to understand how the drama was tied. “Today, even after 4 years of judicial information, their children have no answer on the passage to the act”, explains Me Florent de Saint-Julien, the lawyer for one of the three girls who resides in Germany. The motive, on the other hand, seems clear: the accused would not have supported that Akila asks for the divorce after 54 years of marriage. She had made a request to this effect to her lawyer three months earlier.
A divorce synonymous with “failure”
It was there that her husband, with whom she was sleeping apart, began to harass her. She had filed a complaint against him for the first time in June 2018, then a second time on July 24, accusing him this time of having hit him during an argument. She then explained to the investigators that, since the divorce request, Abderrahmane insulted her more and more often and called her a “whore, slut, drag”. He followed her in the street and regularly returned to the studio she occupied in the house, to check if a man was present. Abderrahmane was then placed in police custody on July 30. Then summoned before the prosecutor’s delegate for a criminal composition procedure.
Three days later, he killed his wife. What happened that night to make him commit the worst? To the police, he recounts having argued with Akila after noticing “fresh and shiny” traces of sperm in his bed. According to him, she then said she had a lover and then insulted him copiously. There, he would have “thrown” her on the ground and then hit her with a spade, without really knowing why. However, investigations have shown that his wife had no lover, and no trace of human semen was found in his room.
In her order of indictment, the investigating judge considers that Abderrahmane “obviously did not support the prospect of a divorce marking for him the failure of his whole life, more precisely the division of his heritage, the subsequent sale of his house and a necessarily lonely end of life”.
Impairment of discernment?
The victim tried to flee towards the laundry room. But he made her fall and then hit her about forty times on the head, for about twenty seconds, while she was on the ground, her feet shackled under a piece of furniture, unable to flee or to defend oneself. He harassed her “as if to permanently deprive his wife of speech or even of face”, underlines the instructing magistrate.
One of the experts who examined it ruled out the abolition of discernment but retained an alteration, considering that “the context triggered a state of exaltation with hyperthymia and hyperesthesia responsible for a moment of partial and temporary depersonalization” . A second expert report also concludes that there is an alteration in discernment, Abderrahmane suffering from a “serious paranoid type personality disorder with egocentrism, mistrust, psychorigidity, idealization, lack of consideration of the desire of the other”.
For the daughter of the couple defended by Me Florent de Saint-Julien, the situation “is dramatic insofar as her father killed her mother”. She is waiting for “justice to be done” but will not be present at the trial. “She is in a somewhat difficult situation because she is still in contact with her dad, through an epistolary relationship”, continues the lawyer. “She has not completely cut ties and is in a psychological situation which is very difficult today. The accused faces the penalty of life imprisonment.