2023-08-17 18:44:00
It’s a small world that only asks to live in hiding and prefers to settle accounts discreetly. Rivalries in this cannabis smuggling community can be fierce. Competitors may covet your production. But, when you risk the point of no return, it happens exceptionally, as in a case currently being tried in Namur, that the police are called to the rescue.
It was May 1, 2022, in Ohey, an apparently uneventful Namur village. A mother surrenders to the police. Sabine reports that her son Benoît was the victim of a car theft the night before. The neighborhood survey reveals inconsistencies in their accounts.
The police come to their house. The electricity meter has been tampered with. There are remains of cannabis. In the attic, they discover lamps of the type found in illegal cannabis plantations.
Benoît recognizes the culture. But, he says, he had no choice. He had to set up this installation at home. However, during the investigation, he changed his mind, acknowledging that he had set up this plantation. With Fatbardh, with whom he was selling cannabis, they wanted to earn more. The two accomplices decided to cultivate. But they didn’t have the technical knowledge.
They took advice from Najime, a Herstalien who will be the gardener. His phone picked up 156 times on the Ohey pylon. The results would have been below expectations. Najime would have taken back his marbles, leaving only a part of the material which, it seemed, had to be destroyed.
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A punitive expedition
Benoît and Fatbardh nevertheless decided to launch a new plantation on their own. What Najime would not have appreciated at all. On the night of April 21 to 22, 2022, around 1 a.m., Benoît and his mother Sabine were awakened by suspicious noises. Three people were in the house. No doubt they coveted cannabis. The mother and the son did not let it go. Sabine threw pans. She struggled and dropped with all her weight as a stranger tried to strangle her.
More seriously, Benoît seized a tampered alarm gun. The three intruders fled. They scaled an outside wall. Benoît fired and hit the last one in the back, who fell heavily, fracturing his knee.
A sequestration of several hours
The intruder, Raimondo, was forced to crawl across the floor and back into the house. He was hit by a bullet in the back, which more than a year later is still lodged in one of his lungs. He tasted. Benoît and Sabine called Fatbardh, the son’s partner, as well as two other friends, to whom they also sent a photo of Raimondo, to the ground with a gun pointed at his head in a mock execution.
They questioned Raimondo. They threatened him. They gave him blows in which the prosecution sees inhuman and degrading treatment. They didn’t know Raimondo. In particular, they wanted to know his two companions who had managed to flee.
Those are the hazards of the job when you get home.
Tempers were very high. At one point, Benoît preferred to hide the weapon for fear that his mother would “do something stupid”. “These are the hazards of the job when you come home,” she reportedly said. Sabine was very virulent, throwing to her son: “Kill him”. She used tweezers which she placed up to Raimondo’s bullet wound. To extract the ball? To torture him?
After several hours, Fatbardh drove Raimondo back to Herstal. A cousin of the latter took him to the hospital. Raimondo explained that he had been shot and wounded in a brawl that took place in Liège in the Carré, the exit district of the Ardent City.
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A “return match”
But it wasn’t over. Eight days later, six men attacked Benoît in Ohey, stealing his car. It was clear that it was retaliation. It would be to avoid escalation or out of fear that Sabine called the police.
Following their statements, the police went back to Raimondo, who denounced Najime. He explained that Najime, met in a café, had offered him 20,000 euros to “keep two people for 30 minutes”. He didn’t know the third protagonist who came with them to Ohey.
Raimondo repeated it in court. “This individual left me on the ground 5 meters from him”, he said following Najime’s lawyer had pleaded for acquittal since, in his eyes, nothing demonstrated Najime’s presence in Ohey on the fateful night.
Me Jonas Mathieu, Raimondo’s lawyer pleaded the error of youth of this man who was only 20 years old at the time. He requested a reprieve. The two men risk much more: the representative of the public prosecutor’s office requested four years in prison once morest Najime and 30 months once morest Raimondo.
But it is obviously Benoît and Sabine who risk the heaviest sentences: seven years were required once morest the son and five years once morest the mother. Their defenses pleaded for a stay. Judgment September 1.
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