At the Assises de l'Hérault (illustration) -
N. Bonzom / Maxele Presse
A thirty-something was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years of criminal imprisonment by the assizes of the Hérault for the assassination, in 2017, of Joaquim, a 20-year-old student with whom he had just had an altercation in a street in Montpellier.
The Assize Court accompanied the sentence with a two-thirds security measure and an obligation of socio-judicial monitoring and care for ten years.
If the convict did not respect this obligation, he would be liable to five additional years of imprisonment, warned the president.
The Advocate General had requested 25 to 30 years imprisonment with a two-thirds security period against the accused, considering that this 31-year-old man represented for society a "time bomb" after a lonely life, marked by breakups, violence, drugs and alcohol.
A "significant social danger"
The assassination, committed on the evening of November 2, 2017 in a street in the Ecusson, was filmed by surveillance cameras.
The man first intervenes in an argument between Joaquim and his girlfriend, in a street in Gambetta.
After an exchange of blows, he walks away while the geography student leaves for the historic center, with a friend.
A few minutes later, the man goes up the rue Saint-Guilhem, running barefoot and armed with a large knife.
He deals several blows to the student, whose thorax is pierced through the heart and who dies before help arrives.
The psychiatrist expert highlighted during the trial the "significant and persistent societal danger" of this man, several times convicted of violence and in particular attacks with a knife.
Wednesday, before the verdict, the accused expressed regret for having "broken" a family in this affair which had aroused great emotion.
A tribute was paid rue Saint-Guilhem, where Joaquim lost his life.
- N. Bonzom / Maxele Presse
"In atrocious conditions"
The man's lawyers challenged the premeditation.
They underlined the extreme loneliness of the accused who never found his place in France after being uprooted at the age of 16 from the village of Aurès, in Algeria, where he was raised by his Kabyle grandfather.
At the helm, the mother of the victim gave a poignant testimony: an Argentinian translator, she explained that, like many women from her country of origin, the mothers of the disappeared from the dictatorship (1976-1983), she would henceforth "carry the memory" of her murdered son "in atrocious conditions".
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Languedoc-Roussillon
Assassination
Trial
Student
Montpellier
Justice