Before plunging into the horror of the crime scene, which investigators and forensic scientists should testify on Thursday, the jurors of the Hauts-de-Seine assize court got to know Mohieddine D., accused of having killed her 15-year-old son and kept the corpse as it was, hidden under a rug and rolled up blankets for eighteen months.
A year and a half living in an apparent normality, taking the dog out and shopping in Bagatelle, this district of Neuilly-sur-Seine where he lived with his wife and child.
Until the death of his wife, swept away by cancer in 2014, that of his son whom he denies having killed, in December 2015, then until 2017 when a bailiff and the police discovered the body of the teenager when they came to expel Mohieddine.
“In Bagatelle, I was very loved, respected.
Everywhere, I am respected ”, likes to repeat the accused from the box.
A haughty bearing, elegant but not ostentatious, this 69-year-old man immediately appears as a confident man.
To each question asked, he answers, but preferably next to it, always seeking to place his speech without really caring about what the court wants to know.
The accused and his high opinion of himself
Asked about his activities in Algeria, his country of origin, he lectured on the war of decolonization and then terrorism.
Asked about the communication company he created, he digresses his relations with the powerful.
We nevertheless manage to grasp its course.
He was 2 years old when his parents fled Algeria in 1954, grew up in Tunisia, returned to Algeria, joined France in the early 1980s. He studied there, returned to Algeria where he settled down. is involved in politics.
Member of the National Transitional Council between 1994 and 1997, he was "very exposed", "a target for terrorists", he said.
"I have been ministerial twice but I refused," he adds with some vanity.
In everything he has done, the man seems to take a visible and assertive pride.
Then there was business.
A communications company where he advised "business leaders and ministers" on trade between France and Algeria.
"I was very prosperous and I still follow him", proclaims the sixty-year-old in the box.
As if financial ruin wasn't an option for this man, seeming to genuinely think highly of him.
A hidden adoption
However, those around him say he has been ruined since the beginning of the 2010s. He sold his apartment in Neuilly.
His house in Algeria too.
And in 2013 he became a tenant of the two-room apartment on rue de la Ferme, which became a crime scene.
"It was not a question of money, it is because my wife wanted the apartment on the ground floor with the terrace", justifies the accused.
The following year, his wife died after months of suffering.
The man is dejected but resists.
Her adored, “wonderful” son takes up even more space.
This son whom he called "the crown prince", Mohieddine and his wife had always led the family to believe that they had had him by in vitro fertilization.
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It was the investigation into the murder of the child that revealed that this boy had been adopted in Algeria.
"It's my privacy, I didn't have to say it", evades the accused.
Who also hid the adoption from the psychologist appointed by the examining magistrate.
"As long as the body is hidden, it can act as if it doesn't exist"
Called to testify on Wednesday, the practitioner described “the narcissistic dimension” and the “psychic rigidity” of the accused, who nurtures “an egocentric vision of himself” and “over-invested his son”.
Son he saw brilliantly studying to become an important adult when the teenager was struggling at school.
If Mohieddine killed his son, the expert psychologist puts forward the hypothesis of a suicide attempt that the accused would have "extended" to his son.
Ruined, widower, Mohieddine would have liked to die but by carrying his son "considered as an extension of himself" in death.
Over the eighteen months of daily life with the corpse, the psychologist evokes “the mechanism of cleavage, which consists in protecting oneself in order to avoid collapse.
As long as the body is hidden, it can pretend it doesn't exist.
»On June 6, 2017, when the bailiff and the police knocked on the door, it was impossible to pretend.
The trial ends on Friday.