After 17 long hours, the daughter of the owner of a bazaar in Paris is also released. The man, an Algerian already known for psychiatric problems, wanted to re-discuss a court case
PARIS – After 17 very long hours, the kidnapping ended: the attacker was arrested without bloodshed. The man, a former Algerian magistrate yesterday afternoon, had taken two women hostage armed with a knife in a shop of the rue d’Aligre, in the 12th arrondissement of Paris. And then around 10 pm he had released his mother, who runs the Go Shop bazaar near the Bastille, and detained his 23-year-old daughter. The BRI (Search and Intervention Brigade) of the French police had intervened yesterday by surrounding the shop and starting the negotiations. This morning the raid by the police who freed the young woman and arrested the former magistrate. The outcome of the operation, successfully conducted without bloodshed, was announced by the French Interior Minister Grard Darmanin.
Le preneur d? Otage at interpell. The n? Ya pas de bless. Merci aux agents de la @prefpolice et notamment the BRI. #aligre
– Grald DARMANIN (@GDarmanin) December 21, 2021
The kidnapper born in Tunis 56 years ago known in the neighborhood and to the police for psychiatric problems. The terrorist trail was excluded.
Abderaman BJ (this would be the identity according to radio Europe 1), magistrate, wanted to discuss the famous case of Omar Raddad, defended by lawyer Noachovitch. Abderaman may have been influenced by the reopening of the Raddad case, Thursday 16 December, 27 years after the events.
Omar Raddad was the protagonist of one of the vthe most complex and controversial judicial issues in France. In 1991 the body of Ghislaine Marchal, a wealthy 60-year-old widow, was found in her villa La Chamade on the heights of Mougins, in the South of France. On the doors of the cellar and the boiler room, near the body, two writings with the same words were found: “Omar m’a tuer”, Omar killed me (but with a relatively common spelling mistake in France, tuer, to infinity, instead of the past participle tue which would have been corrected).
In 1994 Omar Raddad was sentenced to 18 years in prison, the Moroccan gardener of the victim, at the end of a very popular trial. The star lawyer Jacques Vergs, lawyer among others for the terrorist Carlos, the Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie or the Khmer leader Kieu Samphan, took the defense of Omar Raddad and tried, as always, to turn the trial into an indictment against colonialism and the racist temptations of France. Raddad was accused of the crime on the basis of an ungrammatical writing, which therefore according to the lawyer Vergs was easily placed on the Moroccan gardener. After dozens of appraisals and a highly contested ruling, in 1996 President Chirac partially graces Omar Raddad also by virtue of a personal intervention by the king of Morocco.
The reopening of the case, last Thursday, with the request for new graphological expertise, it could have inspired the attacker to take women hostage in order to be able to talk to Omar Raddad’s new lawyer, Sylvie Noachovitch, which took the place of Jacques Vergs who died in 2013. There is talk of a sudden interruption of psychiatric therapy, which could have contributed to the crisis.
