The first day of the trial of Moufide Bouchibi, presented as one of the biggest French drug traffickers on the run for ten years before an arrest in Dubai, was held Wednesday in Bordeaux in a stormy climate, peppered with suspensions of hearings and in an atmosphere of procedural guerrilla warfare.
Read also One of the French cannabis barons tried in Bordeaux
Nicknamed "
Mouf
", the 41-year-old Franco-Algerian is being prosecuted for ten go-fasts and the importation from Morocco of hundreds of kilos of cannabis resin in 2011 and 2012. The man is on trial until Thursday. for the second time for these facts by the criminal court which sentenced him in 2015, in his absence, to 20 years in prison and a million euros fine.
Procedural debates
After ten years on the run, he was arrested in March in Dubai before being transferred and imprisoned in France in May.
Facts and an incarceration that he disputes.
"
We hear in the media the police explaining to us that it is the most trafficker of all time, it is not what there is in the file
", declared to the press one of his three defenders. , Me Thomas Bidnic.
His lawyers denounce "
a real scandal
" and "
a total bankruptcy
" of justice, "
the court wants to judge Moufide Bouchibi at a forced march
", "
he is kidnapped
", indignant Me Bidnic.
Read alsoMetz: dismantling of international drug trafficking
Open in the morning, the trial, suspended eight times during the day, gave rise to lively exchanges between magistrates and the trio of lawyers. The hearing was first suspended when the defendant, fitted white shirt and cropped hair, claimed to have "had a
headache for four days
", without having been able to see a doctor, and to have been taken from his cell in Gradignan, "
Willingly or by force
". A medical examination ultimately declared him fit to stand trial. The Gradignan remand center, where ten cases of Covid-19 have been detected in recent days (7 among the detainees, 3 among the staff), has been placed in “
cluster establishment
” mode
.
», With activities on standby. Massive screening of 640 detainees and then staff was to begin Thursday. But according to prison sources, this should not jeopardize the continuation of the Bouchibi trial, who is being held in solitary confinement.
In the early evening Wednesday, there was still no question at the hearing of bundles of "
hash
" and go-fasts of big cars at the heart of the case.
Most of the day was indeed devoted to discussing points of procedure, passes of arms between magistrates and lawyers who turned into guerrilla warfare in the courtroom.
The lawyers first questioned the extraction "
by force
", hammering this question: was the "
slip
" issued by the prosecution before or after the start of the hearing?
To read also "I am 20 years old, how many friends have I lost?"
: in Marseille, the dealers facing the settling of accounts
But above all, lawyers have been denouncing for months the illegality of the transfer to France of the alleged trafficker from Dubai, a "
disguised extradition
". For the lawyers, who filed a request for annulment, Moufide Bouchibi was transferred to France "
outside of any extradition decision
", while an agreement binding France to the United Arab Emirates required it. Targeted by an arrest warrant since 2012, the Franco-Algerian was handed over to France in May after his arrest in this emirate often considered the “
new El Dorado
” for traffickers. In a 2-minute video posted on Twitter, the Dubai police confirmed the arrest of the one they renamed for the occasion "
the Phantom
", "
the most famous of the French drug lords
”. Moufide Bouchibi entered into large-scale drug trafficking by associating in the early 2000s with an Alsatian, Sophiane Hambli, known as "
the Chimera
", also considered one of the biggest French traffickers.
