On the eighth day of Nordahl Lelandais' trial, the Isère Assize Court took an interest in a telephone that the accused had destroyed after being released from police custody.
The former soldier claims to have got rid of it so that the gendarmes do not find this device which he allegedly stole during a party.
But Maëlys' mother's lawyer, Me Caroline Rémond, wonders if he would not have filmed with the girl's murder.
At the Assize Court of Isère,
Hands crossed behind his back, Yacin, 37, is uncomfortable.
" What do you want to know ?
Help me, I don't know…” The president of the Isère Assize Court, Valérie Blain, tries to refresh his memory by rereading his depositions.
“Now it comes back to me,” continues this fiber optic technician, originally from Chambéry.
On September 1, 2017, he received a phone call from his friend Nordahl Lelandais, who had been on trial for eight days for the kidnapping and murder of 8-year-old Maëlys.
The accused had been placed the day before in police custody by the gendarmes who were investigating the disappearance of the girl.
But not having enough evidence at this stage, they had to release him.
Yacin joins him in Chambéry.
Together, they take the direction of Lac du Bourget, about ten kilometers further north.
Arrived on the shores of the lake, Nordahl Lelandais takes out a telephone which he places against a concrete pontoon.
“He starts taking a stone and breaking it.
He was hitting it, hitting it, hitting it,” Yacin recounts with machine-gun delivery.
“I ended up picking it up and throwing it in the water.
There, he yelled at me saying, "Why didn't you throw it away?"
At the time, I don't know that he killed people.
I don't think it's to hide evidence.
He told me it was robbed and there was going to be a search of his home.
Yacin had omitted to declare this scene to the investigators during an initial interrogation.
“It slipped my mind.
At the time, he did not think "that this could be important for the investigation".
“He is heavy, he talks a lot”
They then went to friends, Coralie and Fabien.
The TV is on.
In the news, we only talk about this little girl who disappeared during a wedding in Pont-de-Beauvoisin, in Isère.
Nordahl Lelandais is surprisingly “calm” for someone who was present at the party.
“He was as if he wasn't at the wedding,” remained “without saying a word” in front of the screen.
The dialogue with the president is complicated.
The witness is nervous.
He speaks quickly, we don't understand much of what he says except that he doesn't remember anything, or almost.
-Excuse me, I'm sorry.
-Are you stressed?
-I'm not too used to the situation.
In the morning, Nordahl Lelandais answered questions from the court concerning his cocaine consumption, in particular on the evening of the facts.
He denied being the drug dealer some claim he is.
And he assured that to get some, he went through Yacin in particular.
“No, no”, promises the witness.
He has “never” supplied drugs to his friend, even though he has used them with him “once or twice”.
At the start of the investigation, Yacin had been wiretapped.
In one of his telephone conversations, punctuated every two sentences with "fat", he describes the state of Nordahl Lelandais when he takes cocaine.
“He is not in rage mode (…) but he is heavy, he talks a lot”, reads the president.
"How many little girls on this phone?"
»
The magistrate asks the accused to stand up.
“You are coming out of your first police custody.
And the first thing you do is to destroy this phone that has been with you for a year, ”she is surprised.
"It's a phone that I had stolen in a party and which was blocked immediately from a distance, replies Nordahl Lelandais.
It never worked.
And when I got out of police custody, we went to Le Bourget, it's true.
I took the phone and broke it and he threw it away.
»
He feared, he said, that the gendarmes would get their hands on it by searching his home.
“You are then the only one to know that you killed Maëlys but you are afraid of having worries for a stolen telephone?
Or is it because of what was on it?
asks the president.
“I was trying to do everything so that no one would know it was me.
So it was not necessary to talk about cocaine, not to have a stolen phone.
»
At the time, recalls the president, Nordahl Lelandais had explained to the examining magistrate that he had "no real reason" to have got rid of the telephone.
-Why didn't you say right away that it was a stolen phone?
-It may sound silly, but I was ashamed to have stolen this phone.
Investigators had found child pornography videos in another Nordahl Lelandais phone.
In particular, he filmed himself sexually assaulting his little cousins.
Me Caroline Rémond, the lawyer for Maëlys' mother, asks the accused the question that burns his lips:
-Did you film yourself killing Maëlys de Araujo?
- No.
-So why are you breaking this phone, instead of just throwing it away?
How many little girls were there on that phone?
-I will repeat it one more time.
This phone was not working.
The trial continues until February 18.
The accused faces life imprisonment.
Follow the rest of this trial on the Twitter account of our journalist @TiboChevillard
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assize court
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Maelys case
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Isere
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Nordahl Lelandais
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