French justice gave a favorable opinion on Thursday, April 27 to the request of the Italian authorities to extradite Edgardo Greco, an alleged member of the Calabrian mafia convicted in Italy and arrested in February in Saint-Étienne (Loire) after 16 years on the run.
The judgment of the investigating chamber of the Lyon court of appeal (center-east), of which AFP obtained a copy, “
gives a favorable opinion to the request for extradition of Edgardo Greco presented by the Republic Italian
", after noting that the person concerned "
does not consent to (this) extradition
".
Joined by AFP, David Metaxas, the new lawyer for the Italian national arrested on February 2 in Saint-Étienne, where he worked in the restaurant business, announced that he was "immediately filing an appeal in cassation
"
.
“
If he goes to Italy he is legally and physically dead.
Imprisoned there, he will not come out alive
, ”reacted Me Metaxas.
“
Our goal is that he can be retried in France
”, continued the lawyer, specifying that he was going to “
write in this direction to the Prime Minister
” Elisabeth Borne.
"Unfavorable opinion"
On March 30, during the hearing before the investigating chamber of the Lyon Court of Appeal, Me Benoît Courtin, Edgardo Greco's previous lawyer, pleaded in favor of an "unfavorable opinion"
from
the Court of Appeal to this request, for "
non-compliance with the procedure
".
The extradition request was filed at the end of February, after the arrest of the 63-year-old man.
Accused of belonging to the 'Ndrangheta, Edgardo Greco was sentenced in 2006 in his country to life imprisonment for murders committed in 1991, but lived on the run.
He was arrested by the French police thanks to a sharing of information with the Italian carabinieri, within the framework of the I-Can project (Interpol cooperation against the 'Ndrangheta).
"Dangerous"
On February 16, the Lyon Court of Appeal (Centre-Est) refused the release of this man, described as “
dangerous
” by Interpol.
But she had also refused his extradition, citing a "
legal obstacle
" to his surrender to Italy: Edgardo Greco, imprisoned in a prison in the region, "
should have been arrested on the basis of an extradition request from the part of the Italian authorities and not within the framework of a European arrest warrant
”, according to the court of appeal.
The facts of which he is accused date back to 1991, before the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union, on November 1, 1993. This analysis had led to a new approach by the Italian justice.
After arriving in France, the fugitive worked in several Italian restaurants in Saint-Étienne, where he called himself Paolo Dimitrio, and ran his own establishment from June to November 2021, according to testimonies and documents consulted by AFP.
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/KIKO6HTUA5FDJCVN5PDXADVCBA.jpg)