An 82-year-old man, suspected of having killed “out of exasperation” a young neighbor known to the police, Friday evening in a popular district of Charleville-Mézières, was indicted on Sunday evening for murder, said the prosecution of Reims. Hocine Abdellaoui, a retired worker and former member of the navy commandos who took part in the Algerian war, admitted to having killed Mahamadou Cissé, 21, with a bullet from a .22 long rifle that he had had for a long time, specified the prosecutor in a press release.
The suspect said in police custody that he did not know the victim personally but that he shot after being insulted by this young man and attacked by his group who obstructed his passage as he returned home after his usual game of boules. According to him, this group “had been giving him a hard time for 9 years”, consuming cannabis and alcohol very regularly, blocking doors and adopting “anxiogenic” behavior for the neighborhood, prosecutor Matthieu Bourrette told the press on Sunday.
A suspect unknown to justice
The victim, who lived in the same building, had already been sentenced twice for contempt and rebellion, but not for violating the narcotics legislation, added the prosecutor. The suspect, unknown to the courts until then, was indicted for “murder, possession of an illicit weapon and violence with a weapon against a person holding public authority” and placed in pre-trial detention according to the same source.
His rifle, a replica of an M16 acquired according to the suspect in a supermarket in the 90s, had never been regularized. Threatened by the crowd after having fatally injured his young neighbor, the octogenarian had taken refuge in his home and he had aimed at the police officers who had entered his home, before going in-extremis, after the usual summons. His home was ransacked shortly after his arrest, the prosecution said.
He faces thirty years in prison.
Prosecutor Bourrette praised the composure of the police officers who intervened in a tense context, the man being armed with a rifle loaded with 11 bullets while the crowd, which seemed “ready to lynch him” according to the police officers quoted by the prosecutor. , had to be dispersed with tear gas. The investigation was entrusted to the Charleville-Mézières police station and the Reims judicial police.
The investigators will have to in particular “disprove or confirm the thesis of the defendant, of what I would call ‘the crime by exasperation'”, underlined Matthieu Bourrette. This divorced man, father of 11 children, who lived alone and lived in the neighborhood for thirty years, faces thirty years of imprisonment.