at the trial of a figure of narcobanditism, the fear of reprisals
Before the Assize Court of Bouches-du-Rhône, in Aix-en-Provence, Christopher Aouni must answer, until February 3, for the assassination of Saci Labidi, a 29-year-old man killed in an associative local of the Consolat city in Marseille, on March 24, 2018, against the backdrop of a battle to control a drug sales point. “Silence is in order,” slips the lawyer for the victim’s family, Me Fabien Perez, on the sidelines of the hearing.
On the civil party bench are a handful of women. But no man from the victim’s family is present. The brother of Saci Labidi, civil party, says that he will not come to the great regret of the Assize Court of Bouches-du-Rhône which was awaiting his testimony: “He is afraid of reprisals”, according to Me Perez.
In the box of defendants placed under high surveillance, Christopher Aouni, light shirt under a suit jacket, glasses and three-day beard, also announces that his half-brother, called as a witness, will not come to the trial for “reasons of security “. “To try to reach me they want to attack my family”, explains the defendant, speaking of a clan that has become a rival.
This 37-year-old Vitrollais, nicknamed “Chico”, presents himself as a sports educator. Anyone who already has more than 15 mentions on his record, in particular for aggravated theft, admits having engaged in car trafficking. But the ongoing investigations and this trial draw a profile of a completely different magnitude.
Christophe Aouni is under five criminal arrest warrants in cases, in particular in the investigation of a double execution in the parking lot of a shopping center in 2016 in Marseille or that of the death of the drug trafficker “Ronaldo”, in March 2020 in Garges-lès-Gonesse, in Val-d’Oise.
“Combative”
He is also suspected of having killed, in 2018 in the parking lot of the Martigues hospital, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, one of his former friends who accompanied his wife to give birth. A few hours later, he himself was the victim of an assassination attempt and was arrested that day, shot in the shoulder.
The same morning, “I was to be murdered in front of the school when I had to take my daughter to school. It was not done because she was bleeding from the nose ”and did not go to class that day, confirmed Thursday the accused who has no longer had contact with his daughter since this episode. In 2021, he had news because she and her mother, his ex-partner, were threatened and saw their home “broken”. By “those who shot me”, support the one who asked for solitary confinement in prison for security reasons.
“He is combative: he is not in the idea of denying but of deleting that he is not the author of the shooting” against Saci Labidi, explained one of his lawyers, Me Amar Bouaou, from Paris Bar. This last account is based in particular on “a tedious work of telephony” to try to prove it.
Christopher Aouni tends, according to the expert-psychologist interviewed Thursday, to “reject the responsibility on a third party”. President Benoît Persyn wonders what could have explained his switch, around the age of 20, to violent delinquency, he who grew up in a relatively attentive family, with an education closely followed in private schools.