• Two men have been on trial since Tuesday and for three weeks for the murder of Mireille Knoll, 85 years old.

  • Throughout the investigation, the two defendants accused each other of the murder.

    They face life imprisonment.

At the Assize Court of Paris,

They spent the day sitting side by side without ever exchanging a word or even a glance. Each time one spoke, the other took care to carefully fix his shoes or the woodwork of the Assize Court in Paris. Yacine Mihoub, 32 years old in two days, and Alex Carrimbacus, 25, nevertheless seem as lost as the other, at the opening of the trial for the murder of Mireille Knoll, this octogenarian of Jewish faith killed by eleven shots stabbing on March 23, 2018. While facing life imprisonment, the two men continue to accuse each other of the crime. "I recognize the fire but not the facts of theft and aggravated murder", begins Yacine Mihoub straight away. "I recognize the participation in the theft and having given my lighter, but not the murder", echoed his co-accused.

But on the first day of the trial - scheduled to last until November 10 - it is not so much the version of the facts of one or the other that interests the court as the story of their life.

Routes marked by violence and trauma.

Hands clasped in the box, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief every two minutes, Yacine Mihoub, short hair, thin-rimmed glasses, recounts the “potatoes, punches or slaps” that his alcoholic father hit on him, then the rape he suffered at the age of 12 by two students at his boarding school.

“It built a kind of anger mixed with hatred and bitterness,” he insists.

"I was in a self-destructive spiral"

According to him, his violence is only expressed against his family who blames him for his excessive alcohol consumption. At the stand, her mother, Zoulikha K., herself prosecuted in this case for destruction of evidence, remembers the day when she had to hastily quit her job because he threatened her sister with a knife. "I did not go get the knife to attack him when the argument broke out," he tries to minimize. His sister will nevertheless be injured in the nose. “I was in a self-destructive spiral, I learned from my mistakes,” he insists. His criminal record, however, gives a different picture from the one he is trying to present. For long minutes, the president reads the litany of his condemnations: thefts, violence, degradations, false bomb threats ... The last dates back to 2017:a sexual assault committed at Mireille Knoll, on the daughter of her carer. Facts that he still denies today. "They never took place," he asserts, struggling to hide his annoyance.

It was during this conviction that he met Alex Carrimbacus.

In 2017, the two men, imprisoned in Fleury-Mérogis, meet on a walk.

But even on this relationship, their versions are completely opposed.

Yacine Mihoub evokes a friendship between them - "without being in the process of becoming a better friend" - sealed around a center of common interest: "Weed and alcohol", he explains.

At these words, Alex Carrimbacus rolls his eyes, struggling to hide his annoyance.

A few hours later, when he is called upon to evoke their bond, he will evoke “a meeting, nothing more”.

Above all, unlike his co-accused, he claims to have seen that they only saw each other once when they left prison, the day before the crime, after having crossed paths fortuitously.

A childhood "strewn with pitfalls"

If the two men hold radically opposed versions of the facts, the stories of their battered lives echo each other. With a shy air but a confident voice, Alex Carrimbacus, short hair and piercing eyes, tells of his childhood "full of pitfalls and chaotic". Placed at the age of 8, he grew up passing from homes to therapeutic centers. On weekends, he returns to his mother's house, suffers the beatings of his stepfather, the sexual assault of one of his half-brothers. He himself recognizes it, he has happened to be "violent at times out of anger and incomprehension". "The only person who transmitted values ​​to him is a maternal assistant," said the personality investigator.

For a long time, his family history is so heavy that he prefers to tell everyone that his mother is dead, burned in a fire.

“So that no one talks to me about it,” he confides.

From adolescence, Alex Carrimbacus began a life of wandering, punctuated by multiple stays in prison - mainly thefts, in particular to satisfy his addiction to crack - and in a psychiatric hospital.

How much? Asks Me Charles Consigny, Yacine Mihoub's lawyer.

“I don't know, four or five, maybe…” “Twenty-five,” the council resumes.

His violence, he also turns against him, multiplying suicide attempts or, as during his last incarceration, in the context of this affair, by scarifying himself "innocent" on the calf.

Justice

Murder of Mireille Knoll: Who killed the Jewish octogenarian?

The mutual accusations of the two implicated

Paris

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  • Murder of Mireille Knoll