He is suspected of having supplied arms to Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who killed 86 people, on July 14, 2016 in Nice, by rushing with a truck into the crowd on the Promenade des Anglais. Endri E., a 28-year-old Albanian, was handed over to France by Italian authorities on Friday (May 21), police said.
“At the end of an extradition procedure, Endri E., born June 10, 1992 in Albania, was delivered today to the French authorities at Fiumicino airport”, the principal of the Italian capital, specifies a press release from the Italian police. Italian justice authorized his extradition two weeks ago.
Endri E., who was the subject of a European warrant issued on April 27, 2020 by France, was arrested on April 21 in Sparanise, near Caserta, in southern Italy. During the hearing which had taken place before the Italian justice, he had denied en bloc the accusations weighing against him: “I have never sold or supplied any weapons and I don’t know any of the people involved. “
His cousin commits suicide in prison
Endri E., nicknamed “Gino”, is implicated for “criminal association” and violation of the legislation on weapons in the “arms trafficking” part of the investigation. He allegedly provided the assailant with an assault rifle, coming from a burglary and hidden in a forest on the heights of Nice, through another Albanian.
He would then have boasted to his cousin, who accompanied him during this transaction, to have defrauded the intermediary “By giving him a Kalashnikov that did not work for 35 grams of cocaine”, according to the order for reference to the Assize Court consulted by Agence France-Presse. His cousin, Adriatik E., suspected of the same facts, committed suicide in prison on June 8, 2018.
Since the investigation is over and the trial is already scheduled, more information will have to be ordered, in particular so that he is questioned and submitted to compulsory psychiatric and psychological expertises, before he can possibly be tried, explained a French judicial source. .
“The trial is not scheduled before 2022, all these acts will probably be carried out by the hearing and he will be able to appear in the box with the others”, commented Me Eric Morain, lawyer for the National Federation of Victims of Attack and Collective Accident (Fenvac).
Trial of eight people in 2022
The Paris Court of Appeal confirmed, in March, the referral to the assizes of eight people concerning this attack. Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel having been shot dead at the wheel of the truck, the special assize court will examine the responsibility of the members of his entourage as well as of the intermediaries involved in the circuit of the weapons intended for him.
For five suspects who provided weapons to the perpetrator of the attack, the judicial information could not demonstrate that they had knowledge of his planned terrorist attack. The terrorist qualification was therefore ruled out and they are sent back to the assizes for common law offenses.
Three men, Mohamed Ghraieb, Chokri Chafroud and Ramzi Arefa, are dismissed for “criminal terrorist association”. The trial should last several weeks at least, in a gigantic courtroom built in the courthouse in Paris, on the Ile de la Cité. The trial, the dates of which have not yet been announced, will not take place before 2022. It will be held in the wake of the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015.
On July 14, 2016, a busy evening due to the fireworks, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian national living in Nice, had mown 86 people, including 15 minors and 33 foreigners, in the space of four minutes while driving a rental truck. He had been shot by the police.