When Bushido came into the hearing room of the Berlin district court on Wednesday, exactly two years had passed since the start of the legal dispute with his former manager Arafat Abou-Chaker.

Clarity, as it becomes clear on this day, is still a long way from being the case.

Anna Vollmer

Editor in the “Germany and the World” department.

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The rapper is asked about a two-hour audio recording intended to document a meeting on January 18, 2018.

At this meeting, Bushido is said to have been thrown at and threatened with a chair and a bottle by Abou-Chaker and his co-accused brothers.

However, nothing of this can be heard on the recording, which is of extremely poor quality.

So the central question revolves around whether the file is authentic, i.e. not edited, and whether it was actually created on that January day.

If that were the case, Bushido would have lied.

"That does not make sense"

However, the rapper and his lawyer hardly seem unsettled by the recording.

The conversation, according to the attorney, "doesn't make any logical sense from start to finish."

Also, the metadata was missing.

It has therefore not been proven whether the recording actually came from January 18th.

Bushido himself goes through the recording in detail and in his statement mostly focuses on things that, in his opinion, "make no sense", as he keeps saying.

He refers to his Whatsapp chat history with Abou-Chaker, which is intended to suggest that parts of what was discussed do not match the chronicle of events.

Curiously, the rapper sometimes sounds almost as if he wasn't actually there during the conversation, so he can only refer to the recording and not his own memory.

He can “neither confirm nor rule out” whether a reconciliation kiss between him and Abou-Chaker, which can be heard on the recording, took place at the meeting.

There have been several meetings in the same constellation "which could have been cause for kissing".

The defense accuses Bushido of "bullshitting".

It is not surprising that he, as the alleged victim and the only witness to the incident, claims that the file is not genuine.

So there are now two opposite pieces of evidence: Bushido's statement and the audio file.

Further trial days will have to clarify which of these is true.

Bushido's interrogation is not yet complete.