Bad day for the investigators. Heard for nearly ten hours by the Assize Court of Aix-en-Provence, the two investigators of the judicial police had to deal with a battalion of lawyers from Marseille and Paris to defend the interests of their ten clients, suspected of having belonged to a powerful drug trafficking network.
Three of them are directly accused of the murder of Kader Benaicha, murdered at the age of 31 on February 16, 2017 after an impressive chase on the A55 motorway, leading from Martigues to Marseille. All, on the other hand, are being prosecuted for associations of criminals engaged in vast drug trafficking and planning crimes. A charge that defense lawyers attacked head on, on this second day of a hearing scheduled to last until May 12, starting with the police investigation, initiated by an anonymous tip.
A breaking defense
Six months after this information, at the end of this investigation carried out with forceful wiretapping and surveillance and concluded by two series of arrests in mid-January and early February 2017 – i.e. a year after the events – the police brought to light during the various searches a technological arsenal to which they are accustomed in their service: five location beacons (devices used by the police, or therefore thugs, to monitor the movements of a target) and numerous encrypted telephones, BlackBerry type, deemed inviolable at the ‘era. Beacons that investigators linked to the assassination of Kader Benaicha but whose lawyers have demonstrated that they had not directly been used to locate the victim’s vehicle. On the other hand, they will have to explain that one of these beacons was, shortly before their arrests in January 2018, placed under the Nissan Juke of another person, a suspected target of this team, which supports the accusation of a association of criminals who were planning other crimes.
But more than this beacon story, the defense skillfully attacked the prosecution on the direction of the investigation. At the home of the victim, whose DNA appeared on the scene of a crime committed a few months earlier, the police found another arsenal of the same ilk, beacons and encrypted telephone, weapons of war and bulletproof vests and more. The analysis of the telephone revealed some 2,500 messages concerning his criminal activities and links with other clans of Marseille drug traffickers than that of the Alamine brothers and Hamza Djouhoud (Hamza was shot dead in Paris in April 2021), whose litigation opponents of that of the Boughameni, accused in the box, serves as a basis for reading the events that interest the court in this trial.
Links with other groups that could be worth to the victim, obviously a seasoned killer if we are to believe the content of the conversations given in reading and the equipment found at his home, enemies well beyond the brothers Malik and Karim Boughanemi. A defense of rupture which does not tend less to minimize the scope of the defendants than to sow doubt, a legitimate doubt, in the minds of the jurors on the commission of the facts.
Up to more than 100,000 euros per day
Because if at the end of the hearing of the investigators, it does not appear indisputable, in the absence of formal material elements, that the defendants were indeed the authors of the murder of Kader Benaicha, the power of the organization that they were training and the scope of their drug trafficking is still intact. It should not be discussed so much by their lawyers. The account sheets found during the searches, with accounts showing receipts easily exceeding 100,000 euros per day, the messages detailing the packaging of the goods and the quantity supply of the three points of sale they managed, these accusations seem hardly debatable. But between thirty years in prison for murder or ten years for drug trafficking, there is a world. Especially when you’ve been in pretrial detention for nearly six years.
Will the jurors be sensitive to this day of hearing during which the defense seems to have scored points? During one of the last major assize trials of Marseille narcobanditry, Kamel Meziani, suspected “boss” of the Oliviers A network, tried in Aix for complicity in the double settling of scores by KFC Plombières, was sentenced to thirty years in prison. in the first place. However, the accusation was essentially based on anonymous testimony and had no material evidence. A precedent that all the lawyers present at this hearing have in mind here. And their customers, in the box, too.
Who are the defendants?
They are ten, therefore, to be accused in this file whose investigation comprises more than 400 pages. Mohamed Djeha, their suspected 41-year-old boss, accused of complicity in this murder in addition to other qualifications relating to criminal associations, on the run, is unsurprisingly absent. Malik and Karim Boughanemi, 46 and 50, as well as Abdelmoumen Mouzaia, 28, the three individuals directly accused of the murder of Kader Benaicha, are released from their prisons and present. Karim Boughanemi had already been sentenced to twenty years for murder by the Var Assize Court in 2009. His brother Malik had also already tasted the assize courts, sentenced to eight years in 1995, then to twelve years in 2007 for robberies. Sick with cancer in remission, he was on leave on the day of the murder for which he is accused. Abdelmoumen Mouzaia, the youngest of this trial, has never been convicted until now.
If they are not indicted on the counts of murder on the person of Kader Benaicha, the six other defendants, aged 56 to 39, are prosecuted for association of criminals engaged in a vast drug trafficking and projecting crimes, in addition to various offenses on the laws of weapons or offenses such as receiving stolen vehicles and destroying evidence. Among them, Jean-Baptise Fuentes, imprisoned since in another case.