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Witness Farhang Ganji Dastjerdeh: "I'm tired of it"
Photo:
Olaf Wagner / IMAGO
"It seems to me that you know more than you're telling us," says the presiding judge.
At this point, the witness has not yet been in the room for fifteen minutes.
His interrogation will continue for two more hours.
Nothing changes in the impression that he wants to say as little as possible.
Farhang Ganji Dastjerdeh – stage name: DJ Gan-G – is 41 years old, wears glasses and is rather slight in stature.
In the trial against Arafat Abou-Chaker before the district court in Berlin, he was taciturn on Monday.
DJ Gan-G obviously does not want to get into the dispute between the rapper Bushido and the Berlin extended family Abou-Chaker.
The fact that he has to testify in court makes him uneasy.
He sits there stock still.
The witness had once accompanied Bushido on tour as a DJ, even in 2018 when Bushido wanted to part with his manager Arafat Abou-Chaker.
For years, the gangsta rapper and the clan boss had earned millions together.
Abou-Chaker is said to have had little interest in ending the deal.
The public prosecutor accuses him of having arrested Bushido on January 18, 2018, threatened, insulted him and attacked him with a chair and a plastic bottle.
Arafat Abou-Chaker is charged with attempted severe extortion, deprivation of liberty, dangerous bodily harm, coercion and insult.
Three of his brothers are accused of complicity or aiding and abetting.
No comprehensive right to remain silent
It seems DJ Gan-G wants nothing to do with any of this.
In March of this year he was already summoned as a witness.
At that time he had referred to a comprehensive right to refuse information.
DJ Gan-G is being investigated in criminal tax proceedings.
The Berlin Court of Appeal has meanwhile ruled that the witness does not have a comprehensive right to remain silent.
He must answer the court's questions.
So on this day he is again in room 500. However, he does little to clarify the matter.
There's the matter of Kay One, another rapper.
The judge asks DJ Gan-G if he knows why Kay One left the Bushido label in 2012.
"Unfortunately, I don't know," he says: "I was never involved in these label things." He adds: "I would say so if I knew." The judge doesn't give up.
How did he explain the break with Kay One back then?
It's nothing unusual for an artist to part with his label, says the witness.
Chief Public Prosecutor Petra Leister is trying to jog his memory.
Did he realize that years earlier there had been a "physical altercation" between Kay One and Arafat Abou-Chaker?
Or was there once talk of an "incident in a cellar"?
"No," says the witness.
He says no more.
Kay One also found it difficult to testify as a witness in the trial.
Kay One only revealed that Arafat Abou-Chaker attacked him in a basement with a baseball bat for a quarter of an hour in 2008 after multiple inquiries.
But DJ Gan-G remains taciturn.
He doesn't want to have noticed anything unusual between Kay One and Abou-Chaker.
The presiding judge asks about the meeting between Bushido and Abou-Chaker on January 18, 2018. Did Bushido ever tell him about it?
Bushido reported a meeting "behind closed doors" and that there was "theater".
The rapper said nothing about physical violence.
skepticism of the judge.
“Think again.” But the witness sticks to his answer.
He was more talkative with the police.
What about the slap?
The judge reads him excerpts from the minutes of his police interrogation in May 2019.
There, DJ Gan-G said Bushido told him that he had been harassed and beaten at the time.
There is talk of a slap in the face.
Today the witness doesn't want to know anything more about it.
Investigators found numerous secretly recorded conversations on Arafat Abou-Chaker's cell phone, including one with DJ Gan-G.
Accordingly, he told Abou-Chaker in April 2018 that Bushido had told him that he was locked up in January 2018.
Bushido told him: “I could probably go to the cops with that.
But I don't want that, I just want to be left alone.« The witness is not disturbed by his earlier testimony.
Then Bushido probably told him that at the time, he replies.
That conversation was his last meeting with Abou-Chaker, says DJ Gan-G.
After April 2018 there was no more contact.
An associate judge asks why.
"I retired." "And why?" "Because I didn't feel like it anymore." He remains true to his tendency to give monosyllabic answers.
A bearded man of impressive stature stands in front of the hall.
The presiding judge asks if DJ Gan-G may have brought "security personnel" to his court hearing.
No, says the witness.
The man in front of the hall door is simply an acquaintance.