2024-04-17 04:53:46
The house belonging to the mayor of Avallon, Jamilah Habsaoui, where the gendarmerie seized 70 kg of cannabis, in Avallon (Yonne), April 8, 2024. ARNAUD FINISTRE / AFP
This Sunday, April 14, the tension is far from having subsided in Avallon (Yonne), since the mayor, Jamilah Habsaoui (various left), is behind bars. A week earlier, in a house belonging to “Madam Mayor”, seventy-five gendarmes, with sniffer dogs and a search section, got their hands on a spectacular loot. It is in the basement of the pavilion, which a soldier from the operation describes as “an Ali Baba’s cave of narcotics”, that they discover a good part of the merchandise. The rest was stored in a shed behind the property. In total, 70 kg of cannabis resin and 1 kg of cocaine.
The searches at the town hall and the neighborhood pharmacy, where Jamilah Habsaoui works two days a week as a compounder, did not result in any arrests. But, elsewhere in Avallon, notably at the homes of two brothers of the mayor and three other people, the gendarmes seized two gold bars, eighteen fake bars, 7,000 euros in cash and fifteen weapons, including two rifles and two rifles.
Here is the quiet town of 6,000 inhabitants transformed into the setting of a police scenario. Sweet Avallon, the last small town served by the A6 motorway before the deep Morvan countryside, appears to be a strategic depot for the distribution of drugs in the villages and hamlets of Burgundy. Social networks are having a field day, mocking the town by “mysterious city of gold”composing satirical songs where the presumption of innocence is shattered, giving echo to an Isabelle Balkany who dares to be ironic “amazing!!! »…
Worry and excitement
On site, the residents are passionate regarding the affair, with concern and excitement. After seventy-two hours of police custody and hearings, their mayor was indicted for “possession and complicity in the supply or sale of narcotics”, and sent to the Dijon remand center. His two brothers, Rachid and Benaïssa Habsaoui, one a welder for the SNCF and the other an employee of a service station, were indicted for “drug trafficking” and placed in pre-trial detention. They were known to the courts – one of them had served a prison sentence in 2004 for similar acts. Since then, the people of Avallon have been calling out to each other in the streets, cafes and on station platforms: did the mayor know that her house was used as a “hideout” ?
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His lawyer, Antoine Audard, assured Republican Yonne that she had been “stunned” and that she “has absolutely nothing to do with the facts with which he is accused”. That of Rachid Habsaoui affirms that the latter served as “nurse” for traffickers, without his sister being ” aware “the drugs being stored “without his knowledge and consent”. This degree of involvement is at the heart of the judicial investigation which enters “in the long term”according to the public prosecutor of Auxerre, Hugues de Phily.
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