Mohamed Lamine Aberouz was sentenced to life imprisonment for complicity in the assassination of a couple of police officers in Magnanville, in Yvelines, in 2016. His older brother, Charaf-Din Aberouz, will be tried this Monday for death threats against a lawyer, said the Paris prosecutor’s office.
At the end of his police custody which began on Saturday, Charaf-Din Aberouz, 37, will be tried immediately at the Paris criminal court for death threats against a lawyer, said the public prosecutor. He faces a sentence of five years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros, it was added.
Suspicions of pressure on witnesses
Charaf-Din Aberouz attended the trial of his younger brother, which opened on September 25 and ended Wednesday with a verdict of life imprisonment with a security sentence of 22 years. Mohamed Lamine Aberouz, 30, has decided to appeal and will therefore be retried.
The elder was heard as a witness on October 4 and, the next day, “during their hearing, certain witnesses went back on the statements they had made during the investigation, before going to sit next to [de lui] or to greet him,” relates the prosecution. The lawyer Thibault de Montbrial, who defended the family of the administrative agent killed in the attack, Jessica Schneider, “wondered about possible pressure from Charaf-Din Aberouz on these witnesses, which created an incident of ‘hearing’ on October 5 and then again on October 6.
“Don’t worry, he’s dead.”
Charaf-Din Aberouz is suspected “of having then headed towards his brother’s box” during a recess of the hearing, “and having said to him “don’t worry, he is dead”, while miming with his finger a slitting of the throat. and showing the bench of lawyers for the civil parties,” according to the prosecution. These remarks, “heard by a gendarme, were reported to Me de Montbrial”.
Close to Larossi Abballa, who had murdered Jean-Baptiste Salvaing, 42, and Jessica Schneider, 36, in the name of the Islamic State (IS) organization before being shot, Charaf-Din Aberouz had initially been indicted for terrorist conspiracy in this case. He finally benefited from a dismissal of the case. Known to the anti-terrorist services, he was sentenced in another case to five years in prison for conspiracy to prepare a terrorist act, after trying to join an Al-Qaeda training camp in 2011. in the tribal areas of Pakistan.