• A forty-something suspected of drug trafficking is to be tried in early September in Bordeaux.

  • He had asked to be released before the trial but the Bordeaux Court of Appeal has just refused his request.

  • In 2015, he was sentenced in his absence to 20 years in prison and a fine of one million euros for drug trafficking.

He will remain in the Gradignan remand center, near Bordeaux, until his trial scheduled for September 1 and 2.

The Bordeaux Court of Appeal on Friday kept in detention one of the most important French drug traffickers, Moufide Bouchibi, arrested in March in Dubai and who asked for his "immediate release", we learned from the general prosecutor's office.

A decision which confirms the judgment of July 6 of the criminal court, which mentioned in particular a "risk of flight abroad".

"A disguised extradition"?

Nicknamed “Mouf”, this 41-year-old man from Essonne demanded his “immediate release” on the grounds that he had been handed over to France on 12 May irregularly, “outside any extradition procedure” and "in disregard" of an extradition convention binding France to the United Arab Emirates. "It is a disguised extradition", which aimed to evade the rules of such a procedure, often long, according to his lawyer Thomas Bidnic. “It appears that there was no request for extradition. However, such a decision was essential for the exercise of all coercive measures against it, ”he explained. In their judgment of July 6, the magistrates wrote that an extradition procedure had not "been concretely implemented in the light of the bilateral extradition convention" between the two States,he recalled.

Before being arrested, Moufide Bouchibi had been on the run for more than ten years.

He was targeted by an international arrest warrant since he was sentenced, in his absence, in 2015 in Bordeaux, to 20 years in prison and a million euros fine.

He had entered into large-scale drug trafficking by associating in the early 2000s with an Alsatian, Sophiane Hambli, known as "the Chimera".

Sofiane Hambli, still wanted by the police, is known to have been a police informant at the heart of a resounding case which had highlighted the controversial practices of the former boss of the fight against drugs, François Thierry.

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