Attempted assassination or failed robbery: after the surprise confession of an accused, in Nîmes, the Richard Perez trial falters

"I'm the victim of a cop plot"

"In no case did I go to Vacquerolles to kill someone" he insists. &amp ;quot;So who shot the policeman ?" asks the president. "Ah, giving names is not my habit" The investigation delivered a name, Jean-Baptiste Belliure, a 65-year-old from Agathus, twice convicted of robberies, whose DNA was found on the car stolen in Lyon and on the shotgun abandoned by the shooter.

"If there's my DNA on the guns, the police put it there, because’ rsquo;there had to be a culprit" replied this thin man with white hair dryly. "I've done 50,000 robberies, I've never left any DNA on the weapons. I am the victim of a conspiracy by the cops he asserts.

The strange SMS received on the day of the events

Robert Alouache, former heavyweight of Marseille banditry, who says he has stopped driving and "like a brother" of Richard Perez, comes to defend his innocence with more subtlety. His case is admittedly less loaded: the justice system is especially surprised that on the day of the events, Hakim Mammad sent him a text message, warning him that his train would be late in Nîmes.

Alouache was in Alpe-d'Huez, and swears, like Mammad, that this was a mistake by the recipient. Raymond Houlonne ? “I don't know him and he doesn't know me.” His rivalry with Richard Perez, which could lead to an assassination plan ? "For animosity to the point of tearing someone down, you have to have a real capacity for action, and you have to have a real problem" he believes. He speaks as an expert: he was convicted in his youth for two homicides, committed "out of revenge."

"You are wrong to have been chasing me for eleven and a half years!"

He assures her: "Richard can't do something like that to me behind my back. He never told me that he paid someone to go and kill Raymond." And he insists, looking at the’ attorney general in the eyes, in a loud voice: "You are wrong, whether you like it or not, to chase me for eleven and a half years for a text message  which was not intended for me!"

It is 7 p.m., Richard Perez arrives at the stand, stressed, talkative, drowning the attention of the exhausted jurors in a host of details. "Est -that you have the intimate conviction that Raymond Houlonne has a responsibility in the assassination of your father ?" request the president.

"Today I don't think so, I thought so for a very long time. There have been rumors going around, a prison is a village" He is outraged by Raymond’s absence Houlonne at trial, who received 3,750 € fined for not coming to testify. "Where are the people who accuse us, where he is the dead man? I am innocent and my friends are innocent of the attempted assassination of’ ;rsquo;a stranger since there is no one there!"

Indictment, pleadings and verdict this Friday, late.

I subscribe to read more