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The bloody picnic of Jehovah's Witnesses back to the assizes

2023-03-14T04:48:17.075Z


Philippe Goncalves is suspected of having wanted to execute his wife in June 2017 in order to be able to start a new life with another. By chance, the bullet did not perforate the skull and his companion survived, barely injured.


A romantic picnic that ends with a bullet in the head and a miraculous victim.

After a first interrupted trial, a member of Jehovah's Witnesses is retried from Tuesday March 14 at the assizes of Seine-et-Marne for an incredible assassination attempt on his wife.

In this dossier, against the backdrop of the rigorous community of Jehovah's Witnesses, a religious movement regularly accused of sectarian aberrations, a pious business leader but attracted to women, a young show-off from the estate and a wife who refuses to believe in her husband's betrayal.

Philippe Goncalves is suspected of having wanted to execute his wife in June 2017 in an isolated corner of the elegant park of the castle of Champs-sur-Marne, on a Sunday evening of Pentecost, in order to be able to start a new life with another.

By chance, the bullet did not perforate the skull and his companion survived, barely injured.

Read alsoStupor in Hamburg after a killing among Jehovah's Witnesses

His misdeed accomplished, he then allegedly asked an accomplice, hidden in the nearby woods, to wound him by shooting him to disguise the crime as an assault.

The 39-year-old defendant persistently denies the charges against him and maintains that his couple was the target of a mysterious gunman hidden in the thickets.

At his side before the Assize Court appears his alleged accomplice, a 29-year-old young man focused on money and women and loving to pass himself off as the tough guy he is not.

Always ready to "

scratch a ticket

", he said he was hired 500 euros by Goncalves to "

scare someone

" and assured that he understood only too late that he was involved in spite of himself in an assassination project .

Started for the first time in June by this same Assize Court, the trial of Philippe Goncalves and Sami M. was postponed on the penultimate day due to the Covid of an assessor.

The hearing therefore starts from scratch, with a new jury.

The Demon of Temptation

Last year's debates showed a man with the appearance of a middle-aged executive, animated by a great and cold intelligence.

Devout invested body and soul in his movement, Philippe Goncalves had been married for 13 years but tormented by a certain temptation for women, which caused tension in his couple.

According to the prosecution, the entrepreneur, who was flirting with one of his employees, wanted to eliminate his wife in order to be able to rebuild his love life without finding himself ostracized by Jehovah's Witnesses.

The scenario presented by the prosecution is totally crazy.

Our client has been claiming his innocence from the start and he is impatient to be able to explain himself to his judges

, ”retorted his lawyers Archibal Celeyron and Camille Radot to AFP.

In this isolated community steeped in biblical principles, leaving one's wife for another is punishable by excommunication.

A fate that had also suffered the own mother of Goncalves, guilty of having left her husband and maintained relations with other men.

There is only one way, therefore, to form a new couple without risking banishment: to be a widower.

However, Jehovah's Witnesses, for Philippe Goncalves, "

it's his whole life

", according to an investigator.

An environment where he entered with his wife at the end of adolescence to give a moral framework to his drifting life.

They went so far as to live in Ukraine within the community of Odessa.

Counting almost only Witnesses in their social relations, they joined their local assembly every evening after work, where Philippe was in charge of ministerial assistant.

Overwhelmed with admiration for her husband, his wife cannot believe that he tried to eliminate her with a bullet in the head, which she received when he asked her to turn around to surprise her ... In June at the helm, she nevertheless ended up recognizing "

doubts

".

Both defendants face life imprisonment.

The verdict is expected on March 20.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2023-03-14

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