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Bushido and his girlfriend at the time and later wife Anna Maria at the Echo Awards 2012
Photo:
POP-EYE / Gabsch / imago images
The petite woman in jeans and a sleeveless, gray-blue summer blouse enters the courtroom with a bodyguard at her side. Armed police officers with balaclavas have positioned themselves in front of the door of Hall 500 in the Berlin Regional Court. Anna-Maria Ferchichi is the wife of the rapper Bushido, real name Anis Ferchichi. This Monday she continues her testimony against Bushido's former business partner Arafat Abou-Chaker. It is the third day that she talks about how much her life and that of her husband have been determined by the clan chief.
Ferchichi and her husband fear for their safety since he wanted to part ways with Arafat Abou-Chaker on business in 2017. The authorities take the threat seriously. Bushido, his wife and children still live under police protection. Bushido himself had testified about Abou-Chaker for weeks and described his long-term business relationship with him as a kind of forced marriage. "It was a love triangle," says his wife, "only that Arafat and I did not have sex." How much Abou-Chaker had controlled everything in her life, she had already reported on the days of the trial. Now she described the day in August 2017 when Bushido Abou-Chaker said that he no longer wanted.
At that time, she and her husband were standing on their property in Kleinmachnow, wondering where to put a fence. Bushido bought the 16,000 square meter property together with Abou-Chaker, including three houses. Arafat Abou-Chaker lived in one house, Bushido was supposed to move in with his wife and children in the house in the middle, and Abou-Chaker's brother lived in the third house.
Arafat Abou-Chaker had come into the garden and he didn't want a fence.
There was an argument.
Bushido's wife says she didn't see that she couldn't even decide how a fence should be placed in her garden.
"Close your eyes and you'll see what's yours," he is supposed to have said to her.
She snapped back: "My husband paid for everything here."
Thereupon he said, "I grew eggs" and that she was probably the man in the house.
Bushido asked his wife to leave.
"I go to the car and hear Arafat yelling at my husband in the worst possible way," she says.
Life would change, "not for the better"
Anna-Maria Ferchichi says she planned to leave her husband with the children again that day, as she did in 2014. She says: "Arafat doesn't give you any air to breathe." But a few hours later her husband reacted surprisingly for her at home. “He told me, 'I'm going to end this. Arafat and I will split up. ”“ She wanted it, but also got scared, says Anna-Maria Ferchichi. She was aware that her life would change from now on - "and not for the better". Nobody wants to live the way they have to live, she says. Her bodyguard sits a few meters away from her.
Bushido was Abou-Chaker's "gold donkey". “He let himself be squeezed. You don't let something like that go. I knew it was going to be dangerous. ”Only then did her husband tell her the truth about his relationship with the clan chief. That Abou-Chaker helped him get out of a contract with his old label Aggro Berlin. That Abou-Chaker then put him under pressure to share in all income from now on.
Abou-Chaker is said to have freaked out when Bushido offered him a one-off sum of tens of thousands of euros instead.
Out of fear, Bushido then agreed to Abou-Chaker's participation, Bushido today portrays it as a pact with the devil. His wife speaks of the “greatest mistake of his life”, “he should have said no”.
He should have endured the anger, possibly the blows that would have followed.
"He'd be a free man today," she says.
Instead, he now had to pay Abou-Chaker money, a total of several million euros.
“We wanted him to go.
Money didn't matter "
After the meeting in the garden, the two men met several times.
Anna-Maria Ferchichi says: "My husband was ready to throw millions down his throat, I think three million," so that Abou-Chaker would accept the separation.
"We wanted him to disappear from our lives, money didn't matter." Her voice is choked with tears.
"But Arafat wasn't ready to let my husband go."
On January 18, 2018, according to the indictment, Arafat Abou-Chaker is said to have locked, threatened, insulted and attacked Bushido in his office in his office in the presence of two of his brothers.
Abou-Chaker must therefore answer for deprivation of liberty, insults and dangerous bodily harm, among other things.
Anna-Maria Ferchichi says she waited for her husband at home for hours and with growing concern. When he finally came he had "a red mark on his left cheek", stared into space and said: "He will never let me go." We'll never get out of there. ”Tears ran down his cheeks. Only the next morning did he tell her that Abou-Chaker Bushido had threatened to "fuck" his children, his wife, his dead mother and his dead father. He cried again when he said that.
She says she sent her husband on vacation. Then she informed the State Criminal Police Office. "I told them that the separation would not be peaceful and that I was very worried." With that, the authorities had a witness from Abou-Chaker's immediate environment, and a little later Bushido also became a witness. That was the beginning of the proceedings against the clan chief. The authorities hope to investigate his business.
