The Court of Cassation quashed the referral to the assizes of the Franco-Israeli hacker Ulcan, accused of having caused the fatal heart attack of the father of a journalist victim of his telephone harassment in 2014, according to a judgment consulted on Wednesday, December 23.
The Paris Court of Appeal must now re-examine the outcome of the proceedings.
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Installed in Israel, this 38-year-old hacker, whose real name is Grégory Chelli, had seized the highest court to challenge his dismissal before the assizes.
He believed that the arguments of his defense on the legality of the arrest warrant issued against him in 2015 had not been studied.
In the summer of 2014, Ulcan, already known for the extreme hoaxes of its “
ViolVocal
” site, had twice targeted the parents of a journalist from Rue89, Benoît Le Corre.
Hacking their lines, the activist had made them believe in the death of their son.
Then, he had passed himself off to the police as an entrenched man who had killed his wife and baby, giving the address of the journalist's parents.
About 20 police officers surrounded the house at 4.30 am.
Four days later, the journalist's father suffered a heart attack and died a month and a half later.
On June 19, 2019, an examining magistrate had decided to send the hacker back to the assizes for "
intentional violence with premeditation having resulted in death without intention of giving it
" and for several offenses related to the harassment of other victims.
But in its judgment of December 16, the Court of Cassation considers that the judge “
cannot issue an arrest warrant against a person residing outside the territory of the Republic, but who is not at large, without having taken the necessary steps to hear it and without having assessed the necessary and proportionate nature of this measure
”.
The defense stressed that Chelli's address was known to the courts, which had questioned him in Israel in July 2015 in another investigation.
Not having responded to these arguments, "
the court of appeal (...) did not justify its decision
" to confirm the referral to the assizes, concluded the criminal chamber.
"
I had never seen in my career a procedure where one has avoided the defense lawyer to this point, from start to finish,
" denounced Me Gilles-William Goldnadel, counsel to Chelli.
For the lawyer of the Le Corre family, "
this strange decision does not correspond to case law
".
"
What do we have to wait for?"
That the civil parties are dead to act?
“, Moved Me Antoine Comte, astonished that the Court of Cassation did not take into account the non-execution of a search warrant issued in 2014 and the extradition request addressed to Israel.