Paris (AFP)

The Court of Cassation will give its decision on December 9 in the case of blackmail to the sextape of Mathieu Valbuena involving Karim Benzema, which challenges the fairness of investigative methods employed by a police officer.

The star striker of Real Madrid is asking for the cancellation of a part of the proceedings in which he is indicted since November 2015 along with five other people, including his childhood friend Karim Zenati and former footballer Djibril Cisse .

Benzema, who has not played in France since this case, and Zenati believe that a policeman who acted under cover as an intermediary between Mathieu Valbuena and the presumed master-singers has exceeded his role by encouraging the protagonists of the case to be guilty of blackmail.

"The investigators have indisputably resorted to a scheme," said the general counsel Frederic Desportes. But "this ploy can not be regarded as disloyal", he insisted. In terms of investigation "if the low blows are prohibited, the simple ruses of war are not," concluded Mr. Desportes, requesting dismissal of the appeal formulated by Benzema.

A few minutes before, the lawyer of the striker Real, Me Fabrice Spinosi, had however recalled "the active role of the commissioner who has relaunched himself the pseudo-masters singers", including then they had have not tried to contact Valbuena for several weeks.

According to him, the policeman took "the direction of the exchanges" and was the first "asked to consider a financial counterpart".

"I know that the time has come for repression," said Spinosi, urging the court not to yield to public opinion that "it is always easier to prosecute than to cancel a stale file" by the mistakes of procedure.

"Did the police provoke the offense? Of course not because their intervention is after the offense," said Valbuena's counsel Me Frederic Thiriez. The player of the Greek club Olympiakos has indeed sought the police after receiving a call threatening to make the video public in June 2015.

"Police are not forbidden to be cunning," insisted Thiriez. On the fact that the police has, on several occasions, relaunched the presumed master-singers, "you must know that the perpetrators use silence to frighten their victims," ​​justified the former president of the Professional Football League (LFP) . "It is normal to restart at certain times to identify the authors," he pleaded.

The 19 members of the plenary assembly of the Court of Cassation now have two weeks to make a final decision in this case.

© 2019 AFP