A thirty-year-old accused of killing a young man during a shooting motivated by drug trafficking on March 17, 2021 in Montargis (Loiret) was sentenced Friday to 25 years of criminal imprisonment, by the Loiret Assize Court.
The sentence of Karim Abbouzi, aged 31, includes a two-thirds security period.
Tried for murder and attempted murder, the accused faced life imprisonment.
The attorney general had requested a sentence of 30 years of criminal imprisonment, with a security period of 20 years.
On March 17, 2021, the accused shot and killed a young man aged 22, and seriously injured a second, aged 20, on the landing of his apartment in Montargis.
Arrested less than an hour after the crime, the shooter always admitted to being the author of the shots.
During the hearing, his lawyer, Maître Morgane Gaury, pleaded for acquittal, in favor of self-defense.
According to investigators, the victims and the accused met on March 17, 2021, for a tough explanation, after weeks of tensions and threats against the backdrop of drug trafficking.
“Jealousy and frustration”
Released from prison under judicial supervision only three weeks before the crime, the accused assured that he never had the intention of diving back into trafficking.
But the victims saw him as a potential competitor.
Karim Abbouzi, already convicted fifteen times before the events, was driven by
“jealousy and frustration”
,
“because he wanted to take back territory”
, estimated the lawyer for the family of the deceased, Maître Paul Denizot.
A thesis partly shared by the attorney general who stressed that the accused had purchased ammunition as soon as he left prison.
“Three shots on two different victims in deadly zones, that’s what this case is
,” summarized the magistrate, Alexandre Kling, before asking the jurors not to minimize the seriousness of the facts on the pretext that it is
“a trafficker who kills another
.