In Marseille, the dantesque trial of a tooth puller – Liberation
At the bar
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Lionel Guedj, a Marseille dentist accused of having mutilated patients, most of them CMU beneficiaries, is on trial from Monday in Marseille. More than 300 victims have joined as civil parties.
Like a reflex, Saleha Nait Ali’s hand goes up to hide her teeth. “As soon as I smile it’s like that, it comes by itself”, almost apologizes the fifty-year-old. She also keeps her mouth shut on the framed photos placed in her living room, at the top of a tower in the city of La Castellane, north of Marseille. This morning, on her table, she placed trays filled with cakes that she will not touch, sweets could revive infections. Sitting opposite her, her daughter Myriam, in her thirties, and her brother-in-law Siaf Didouche, almost 60, will not taste anything either. No more tea, lest they stain their teeth. No apple or anything hard. more than ten years, their teeth died and since their smile with, “stolen” by doctor Lionel Guedj.
On February 28, like hundreds of other patients, they will be in the criminal court to finally attend the opening of the trial of the former Marseille dentist. Lionel Guedj, 41, is on trial alongside his father, Carnot Guedj, who worked with him, for “intentional violence resulting in permanent mutilation or infirmity, in this case the decay, mortification or extraction of teeth without medical justification”, “fraud” and “forgery and use of forgery”. Between 2006 and 2012, the practitioner is accused of having sacrificed, with bridges and other prostheses, healthy teeth on hundreds of patients, all billed to Security…