Enlarge image
Anis and Anna-Maria Ferchichi (archive): Today they live under police protection
Photo: imago
She is dressed all in black, looks determined and impatient.
It's been just over a month since Anna-Maria Ferchichi gave birth to triplets.
Now the wife of the rapper Bushido has to continue her testimony in court against clan boss Arafat Abou-Chaker and three of his brothers before the Berlin district court.
Arafat Abou-Chaker is said to have threatened and attacked her husband.
He is said not to have accepted that Bushido ended the business relationship in 2017.
The charges include attempted, serious blackmail, coercion, deprivation of liberty and dangerous bodily harm.
"How are you?" Asks the presiding judge.
"Thank you, good," says the 40-year-old.
"A little tired, but good."
The judge asked her about January 18, 2018. On that day, Arafat Abou-Chaker is said to have locked Bushido in the office, threatened her and attacked her with a plastic bottle and a chair.
She recounts how upset her husband was afterwards.
She then sent him on vacation with a friend.
Then she went to the police.
Without his knowledge.
There is a police report on the conversation.
It was January 24, 2018, six days later.
There is nothing in it about the alleged incident between her husband and Abou-Chaker.
"I'm surprised," says the judge.
"I knew we couldn't do it alone"
Anna-Maria Ferchichi is overflowing.
She wanted the police to know that her husband's separation from Abou-Chaker was not going off peacefully.
And she knew that her husband would not tell the police anything about the alleged attack in the office.
"He had no backbone, he was scared," she says.
"He didn't want to go to the police for the hell of a lot." Bushido was "stunned" when she told him that she was with the police, "stunned and angry".
But she was also afraid.
"I knew we couldn't do it alone."
The court asks her about another day too.
On September 3, 2018, a friend, Sary H., is said to have been at their home and warned them.
Bushido's wife says she remembers how pale Sary H. was.
"He was white, he was excited, very nervous." He asked her to go out onto the balcony with him.
There he told her that Arafat Abou-Chaker's cousin had said that "something big was going on".
It was clear to her that it was about "an attack".
She began to tremble terribly and smoked one cigarette after the other.
The friend is said to have been afraid too.
"He just panicked."
The judge asks what she imagined by "something big".
"That either me or my husband will be shot," says Anna-Maria Ferchichi.
Today she no longer knows whether Bushido was there, whether Sary H. spoke to him before or afterwards.
You also don't know which cousin said that.
After the conversation she had sleepless nights "because I was scared, because I know he's so mean, he does it."
She means Arafat Abou-Chaker.
She informed the police a few days later.
It was not an easy step.
"We knew what would happen if we testified," she says: "I'm here today with police protection."
The chief prosecutor reads her passages from the interrogation.
Accordingly, she said at the time that the boyfriend first spoke to her husband and then to her.
"It could be," says Anna-Maria Ferchichi.
The chief prosecutor asks further.
How did Sary H. react when he found out that she had gone to the police?
“He didn't think it was good, not at all good.
You don't go to the police in the circles. ”He said his father didn't want him to testify on this matter.
“I could understand why he was being intimidated.” She gives him credit for warning her anyway.
She was sure that the warning should be taken seriously.
And she asserts that she has "definitely not" misunderstood anything.
"Hamudi talks a lot"
The court interrupts her interrogation.
Bushido's wife has to come back another day.
Then Sary H. enters the hall.
He is 30 years old and runs a cell phone shop in Berlin.
He looks tense.
His left foot twitches all the time.
A lawyer is at his side.
In court he tells a different version of that day.
An acquaintance of his, Mohamad N., also known as "Hamudi Wasserkopf", had given him "the advice" that he should stay out of the affair between Bushido and Abou-Chaker.
He said "that something could happen".
Sary H. says he didn't take the whole thing seriously at the time.
"Hamudi talks a lot." He doesn't even know whether Mohamad N. is related to the Abou-Chakers.
Mohamad N. himself said in court that he was not a relative.
The witness says that he went to Bushido almost every day at the time, including that evening.
Then he told Bushido - in the bourgeois way: Anis Ferchichi - what "Hamudi" had said to him.
"Anis was annoyed because he also knows that Hamudi is a nonsense." They would only have talked about it "very briefly".
Anna-Maria was not present at the conversation.
“A statement cannot be true.
The only question is which "
"How did you feel that day?" Asks the judge.
"Quite relaxed," says Sary H. Not a word about panic.
He was "totally annoyed" when he found out that the police had found out.
He speaks of a misunderstanding.
The associate judge asked the witness how well he knew Arafat Abou-Chaker and his brothers.
Their families come from the same village in Lebanon, says Sary H. Their fathers and grandfathers already knew each other.
He himself has not had any contact with the defendants since 2018.
Contact with Bushido was also broken off.
"He's probably upset because I said it was a misunderstanding."
The presiding judge confronted him with Anna-Maria Ferchichi's testimony a few hours earlier.
And with the fact that your statements are so completely different from what the witness is now saying.
“Doesn't have to be true,” replies Sary H. “You're right,” says the judge: “A statement cannot be true.
The only question is which one. "