Le Figaro Lyon
The tragedy had shaken an entire street, a neighborhood, a city.
He will return to court over the next ten days.
The appeal trial of the two managers of the bakery at 125 route de Vienne, ravaged by an arson which cost the lives of a young pregnant woman and her four-year-old daughter, in 2019, opened this Wednesday, before the court of Ain this time.
Sentenced to 19 and 17 years in prison at first instance last year in Lyon, the two men were, despite their denials, found guilty of having ordered the fire of their business, in financial distress, to a third individual .
The latter was sentenced in Tunisia, where his sentence was recently increased on appeal, to 20 years in prison.
Filmed with his arms burned, Adel B. fled the day after the fire.
It was he who had lit the two fireplaces, which quickly became out of control.
The blaze, of incredible violence, quickly spread upstairs, where the victims' family lived: Julien, Clara and their daughter Ana.
Even in the neighboring house
“the tiles of the bathtub were falling”
a resident confided during the trial at first instance.
In front of a courtroom with red eyes, the father, Julien, the only survivor after throwing himself out of the window, screamed his pain at not having been able to save his wife, 8 and a half months pregnant, and his daughter Anna.
He was in the living room while his partner put their daughter to sleep, a few days before giving birth to their second child.
“Anna was my whole life
,” he told a court plunged into the dizzying abyss of his pain.
“Anna was my whole life”
Words which had moved even the defense, whose lawyers had nevertheless insisted, like Me François Saint-Pierre, on
the “absence of formal proof”
of the involvement of the managers as sponsors.
Both men have always denied the facts.
But the poor financial health of the business opened two months before the dramatic fire of February 9, 2019 had reinforced the motive for the insurance fraud during the investigation.
The attorney general had pointed out during the trial at first instance the bakery's unpaid bills and the swelling turnover.
Zouhaier B. admitted to having tried to take advantage of the fire
after the fact
, by presenting false invoices to obtain insurance reimbursements, which were in progress at the time the accused were arrested.
“A diabolical plan”
for the family of the victims, which plunged the father into
“an immense void”
, after months of coma and treatment to heal his lungs burned by the fumes.
Even his wife's notebooks were burned in the fire, the photos, the memories.
“Today, Julien only keeps one of his daughter's cuddly toys that he picked up at school,”
his lawyer said last year.
If he doesn’t have it, he can’t fall asleep.”