November 18, 2016, on the heights of Marseille. A jogger discovers the partially cremated body of 15-year-old Rudy, known to be a small hand in a network of the city’s many drug networks. The autopsy quickly concluded with a cold execution – he was shot, hands tied behind his back, from two shots fired from the shotgun, up and down at very close range. First in the thorax, then in the head. That year, the number of settlements, with 29 victims, set a grim record. Rudy was the youngest of them.
Arrested seven months later, Khadim Thiam, 28, and Samir Zerouali, 26, appear this week before the Aix-en-Provence Assize Court for the assassination of Rudy. Facts for which they risk life imprisonment with a safety sentence of 30 years, and which they fiercely deny.
Already convicted in the same kidnapping case
“I am not an assassin,” Khadim Thiam introduced himself. “I have always had a certain honor to confess my facts, Mr. Judge,” continued the accused, his voice high and his hands behind his back. A first assertion quickly undermined when the president of the court evokes his last conviction to date, which the accused disputes from the box, although he did not appeal: 9 years in prison, pronounced in spring 2020 in a case of kidnapping that occurred a month after this assassination. A sequestration for which his co-accused, Samir Zerouali, received the same sentence. He presents himself as a “nurse thief”, these apartments where weapons and narcotics are stored by the networks, and thereby tries to justify the weaponry found at his home during the searches which followed his arrest.
The bloody spiral that led to Rudy’s assassination is approached on this first day of the trial by the president of the court during the reading of the indictment, which lasts more than an hour. A summary of the facts as reconstituted by the investigation which brushes, roughly speaking, the cruel reality of the confrontations which can deliver various teams of traffickers of the northern districts. Except that the killers attacked a fifteen-year-old boy that evening.
A long-awaited key witness
The mobile, first. The assassins suspected him of having given the green light to the launch, two weeks earlier, of a previous settling of accounts targeting a car and its occupants in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant in Plombières. The car that the attackers had taken care to mark out, a detail which suggests that Rudy had nothing to do with this affair. The investigation, then, and the designation of Samir and Khadim as the killers by Nourdine, with whom Rudy was a few hours before his execution. His testimony, scheduled for Thursday morning, is in fact eagerly awaited. Rarely in a settling of scores trial, a significant portion of the 18 witnesses called should be present, a move facilitated by the fact that a good number of them are currently in detention, and which could allow the court to dive in. in depth in this war of the narcotics which gnaws the city.
“It’s not that I’m looking at you askance, I have a problem with one eye,” Samir Zerouali quickly slipped to the court during his presentation. “I am innocent (…) I am here to clean my name”. And to add a few minutes later, while the exchanges with the president of the court are strained. : “I took it for 31 years already, one more sentence, that doesn’t change anything for me. I would tell you, otherwise. “
Thirty-one years, that’s what the cumulative sentences represent, starting with the last one pronounced in January of this year: 8 years for his participation in an attempt to settle scores in March 2017. Thirty irreducible years , this is what the lawyers will try to avoid to the two accused, in this case where the material elements are not legion. The debates are scheduled to last until the weekend.