Paris (AFP)
A fourth suspect indicted in the investigation of the attack in Nice, which had made 86 deaths in 2016, was released and placed under an electronic bracelet in early August after more than three years of pre-trial detention, learned Wednesday. AFP from judicial sources.
On 6 August, an investigating judge of the Paris court issued an order for release accompanied by a house arrest under electronic surveillance of Mohamed Oualid G., confirmed ten days later by the Chamber of Education of the Paris Court of Appeal following an appeal by the Public Prosecutor's Office.
Aged 43, Mohamed Oualid G. was in custody since 21 July 2016.
The Franco-Tunisian, a receptionist in a hotel in Nice, had spontaneously presented himself to the police the day after the attack on July 14, 2016 after the fireworks of the national holiday by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a Tunisian of 31 years .
The two men met in Tunisia in 2003 before ending up on the Côte d'Azur six years later.
Mohamed Oualid G. quickly became suspect, in particular because of a photograph showing him, on July 13, in the cabin of the truck that Lahouaiej Bouhlel had launched the next day on the crowd, killing 86 people and injuring 400 others before to be shot.
That same day, he had also bought Lahouaiej Bouhlel's car. The investigations also recorded 1,278 calls between the two men between July 2015 and July 2016.
He has always claimed his innocence. His release is "an absolutely coherent and logical decision with regard to the erosion after long investigations of what did not constitute at the beginning not charges but only indications of proximity with the author of the attack of Nice, "said his lawyers William Bourdon, Bertrand Repolt and Vincent Brengarth.
For counsel, these "three years of pre-trial detention (...) can only be explained by a duty of infinite, therefore excessive precaution, of the judges and the antiterrorist prosecution to consider releasing a charged person when they are instructed to investigate facts of exceptional gravity ".
This is the fourth of eight indicted in this case to obtain release, after those in November 2017 of the Franco-Albanian Enkeledja Z., and in August 2018 of Hamdi Z., a member of the entourage the perpetrator of the killing and that, in January 2019, Brahim T. A ninth indicted committed suicide in jail in June 2018, a few days after the renewal of his pre-trial detention.
According to several sources close to the case, the investigations should be concluded by the end of 2019. At a meeting in November 2018 with the civil parties, the investigating judges indicated that they were not sure they could Terrorist qualification for the links between the suspects and the killer.
The Islamic State group had broadcast a claim for the attack, deemed probably opportunistic by the investigators who found no link between the organization and the killer. They believe, however, that Lahouaiej Bouhlel, psychologically unstable and fascinated by ultraviolet violence, could however have been influenced by recurrent calls to the murders launched by the IS, which recommended this modus operandi.
© 2019 AFP