Amar Ramdani affirms it: in the laundry room of the Villepinte remand center, where he was assigned from January to July 2013, he folded sheets.
Among the other prisoners responsible for this task: Amedy Coulibaly.
According to the prosecution, the latter, the assassin of Hyper Cacher in January 2015, had transformed the premises into a recruitment office for jihad.
A former prisoner, who is to be heard on Thursday, even spoke of a
"sect"
.
The prosecution is very keen on this "connection laundry" to make Mr. Ramdani and Mickaël Pastor-Alwatic, sitting three seats away from him in the box, zealous auxiliaries to the murderer.
Read also:
Trial of the January 2015 attacks: one of the defendants denies knowing Coulibaly's plans
But Amar Ramdani is defending himself.
Intelligent and charming, he argues that "Doly" (the nickname of Amedy Coulibaly) was
"intelligent, helpful, friendly"
,
"the kind of guy who does not embittered conflicts"
and
"distributing cakes"
during Ramadan.
Certainly, he was detained for a terrorism case in which Chérif Kouachi was also implicated, but said he was foreign to the facts - he will not be condemned for that.
According to Mr. Ramdani, they did not talk about religion and there was nothing to suggest that Coulibaly, released in April 2014, was a radicalized fanatic:
“For me, it was Doly, a prison buddy who became an anti-Semitic terrorist on the 9th. January 2015. "
The individual known for car credit scams is less comfortable justifying five round trips, at the end of 2014, in the Lille region in the company of Saïd Makhlouf, sitting next to him.
He brings up a narcotics case, and another car dealership scam.
We know that the terrorist's weapons came from northern France, where Mohamed Fares resided, sitting next to Mr. Makhlouf.
We also know that no formal proof that the Ramdani-Mahklouf tandem brought these weapons of war to the Paris region is in the file.
Finally, we know that the Lille traffickers of Kalashnikovs and other Tokarev pistols were identified but tried separately, which opens up abysses of perplexity over this curious procedural disjunction.
The public prosecutor patina
MM.
Ramdani and Mahklouf
"could not ignore"
that Coulibaly
"was likely to commit terrorist crimes"
, asserts the order of indictment.
The prosecution is skating to demonstrate this at the hearing, despite disturbing coincidences.
He also skates to establish that the accused Ramdani gave funds to the terrorist to finance his plan: only a € 50 note bearing his fingerprints was found on Coulibaly's corpse, a derisory sum that the accused justifies - moderately convincing, but he does not have to prove his innocence.
To read also:
The abundant "telephony" of the terrorists before the attacks of January 2015
Me Christian Saint-Palais, who assists him with his colleague Daphné Pugliesi, then stands at the microphone and reads a report from the Prison Administration on the supposed proselyte of the laundry room: imprisoned in Villepinte in a terrorist case and mixed with other inmates , Amedy Coulibaly was showing
"exemplary behavior"
.
Which had earned him a letter of congratulations from the director of the remand center.
“Yes,
confirms Amar Ramdani.
It had helped him get out faster. ”
His ex-partner comes to testify.
E. was a gendarme at the time;
she was stripped from executives in September 2015. She wears long hair, a tight skirt, black tights and heels.
Converted to Islam in 2011, she had met Amar Ramdani through a friend of hers, a prison supervisor.
The handsome kid,
"very funny, kind"
, had promptly seduced her.
Witness:
“I asked my friend, 'What's the problem?
Is he too perfect? ””
