The drama had aroused great emotion in Belgium.
A police officer was sentenced Friday, in Mons, to a one-year suspended prison sentence for shooting a migrant van unintentionally killing a two-year-old Kurdish girl, during a chase on a highway in 2018. It is the sentence demanded by the prosecution against Victor-Manuel Jacinto Goncalves, 48, convicted of "manslaughter by lack of foresight or precaution".
He faced up to two years in prison, but the criminal court took into account "the lack of a criminal record and the sincere regrets he expressed", according to the judgment.
During the trial at the end of November, the representative of the public prosecutor's office noted the absence of evidence proving that the police officer "deliberately wanted to harm the life of others".
"If I had known there was a child"
The backdrop of the drama is the smuggling of migrants in the Paris-Brussels-London triangle and the policy of the Belgian government deemed too “repressive” by the associations that defend them.
On the night of May 16 to 17, 2018, on a motorway in Wallonia, south of Brussels, a van full of migrants taken care of in France, in Grande-Synthe (Nord), accelerates to escape a police car that wants intercept it.
Faced with this refusal to comply, one of the police officers takes his gun out the window.
He aims for the "left front tire" while doubling, according to his explanations during the investigation, but a sudden blow of the wheel from his colleague deflects his shot.
Against the police officer, the court sentences him to 1 year suspended prison sentence and a € 400 fine as well as a 3-year probation #Mawda
- Mel Saint-Surge (@MelJoris) February 12, 2021
Inside the van, Mawda, seated behind the driver, is hit by a bullet that goes through her head.
She died in the ambulance.
The policeman responsible for the shooting quickly recognized his gesture.
But, he asserted at the trial, "if I had known that there was a child (in the vehicle being chased), I would never have drawn my weapon".
In its reasons, however, the court considered its fault "established beyond doubt".
“The objective of stopping the van could be achieved by other means such as the establishment of a roadblock,” he argued.
Choosing to shoot, even when aiming for a tire, amounted to "seriously endangering the occupants of the van or even other road users".
A relax
Indicted after a year and a half and left free by the investigating judge, Victor-Manuel Jacinto Goncalves was on trial with two Iraqi Kurds who were part of the group of migrants and suspected of having caused the chase.
One of them, Jargew Del, 21, was sentenced to four years in prison as a driver.
His DNA had been identified on the steering wheel, the gear lever, and on a butt found in the front of the van.
The prosecution had demanded ten years against it.
Like the police officer, he has thirty days to appeal the judgment.
The other, Rasol Dilman Ahmed, 28, suspected of having conveyed the migrants, was released for lack of evidence.
The prosecution had requested seven years in prison.
Me Selma Benkhelifa, lawyer for Mawda's parents, was surprised at the "disproportion" between these requisitions and that aimed at the police officer, seeing in the two young Kurds the "scapegoats" of the case.
Having fled Iraq in 2015, aged under 25, Mawda's parents arrived in Europe crossing the Mediterranean.
At the time of the tragedy, they were looking for a passage to England from the vicinity of Calais in France.
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Their daughter was buried in Brussels in July 2018, and the couple had been enjoying temporary residence rights in Belgium since February 2019 for humanitarian reasons.
Their situation is now regularized "definitively", announced Friday on public radio the Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, Sammy Mahdi, stressing to have used his "discretionary power".
“It was normal for them to be able to experience their bereavement in a peaceful manner,” he said.
