Prosecuted for a deadly settling of accounts and sentenced to 14 years in prison for drug trafficking, a 30-year-old Marseille man is again under an arrest warrant: two days before this conviction, the Court of Cassation had returned his freedom.
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Extradited from Morocco at the end of December 2019, already condemned a dozen times, this 36-year-old Marseillais was then placed in pre-trial detention for two files - a settling of accounts having left two dead and one injured in October 2016, and the drug trafficking of the network of Olives, an important place of sale in the North districts of Marseille, of which he would be one of the leaders according to the investigators.
His first warrant of deposit, targeting drug trafficking, had been lifted on June 24 by the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal, based on the case law of the Court of Cassation on the orders taken at the time of the Covid-19 epidemic and providing for an automatic extension of pretrial detentions, a measure the Court had limited.
Still detained for the criminal component of these cases, he appeared on July 3 to be tried for drug trafficking. But that day his lawyers had demanded the recusal of certain magistrates composing the tribunal and who had already tried other members of the network. Finally raised Monday, July 6, the case had been put under advisement to Friday.
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" It's played at 24 hours "
But meanwhile, Wednesday, the defendant was finally released by a decision of the Court of Cassation: the latter considered that the Aix-en-Provence court of appeal had been too late to rule on a request for release who accompanied the extradition challenge filed in February by his lawyers Mes Thomas Bidnic, Raphaël Chiche and Dominique Mattéi.
In particular, the need to translate the Moroccan extradition decree which had considerably complicated the work of the court, postponing its decision ... Result: when the Marseille Criminal Court sentenced him Friday to 14 years in prison, the warned is no longer there. The court issued an arrest warrant against him. " It was played at 24 hours, " laments one at the Marseille courthouse.
His lawyers will appeal the judgment because " the court which imposed 14 years in prison did so in violation of basic rights, " say Mes Bidnic and Chiche. " He was tried by people who had already called him a network leader and chose to try him without a lawyer, as if to punish him for filing a motion for recusal ."
