The prosecution requested Thursday in Paris sentences of fifteen and twenty years of imprisonment against two men accused of the “sordid” murder in the Bois de Boulogne in 2018 of Vanesa Campos.
The victim was alone facing a “pack”: the prosecution requested Thursday in Paris sentences of fifteen and twenty years of imprisonment against two men accused of the “sordid” murder in the Bois de Boulogne in 2018 of Vanesa Campos , an undocumented transgender sex worker. Advocate General Olivier Auféril asked for the heaviest sentence, twenty years of criminal imprisonment, for Mahmoud Kadri, 24, named by all of his co-defendants as the one who shot Vanesa Campos on the night of August 16 to 17. 2018, which he disputes. Against Karim Ibrahim, 29, also referred to the Paris Assize Court for “murder in an organized gang”, the representative of the prosecution requested a requalification as “complicity in murder” and a sentence of fifteen years of imprisonment.
The Advocate General also requested five-year prison sentences, one of which was suspended, against six other defendants aged between 23 and 34, for their participation in the punitive expedition that led to the murder or for the theft of the murder weapon.
The latter’s lawyers began to plead in the afternoon, asking the court not to “validate the prosecution’s thesis” and not to “let itself be caught up in the general condemnations” required, without distinction of the personalities of each. For the eight defendants of Egyptian origin, the Advocate General also requested a ban on carrying weapons and a ten-year or permanent ban from French territory.
Vanesa Campos, a 36-year-old Peruvian, was killed “in sordid conditions”, near her workplace, in one of the most remote places in the Bois de Boulogne, devoid of public lighting, recalled the representative of the Public minister. She had found herself “naked, defenseless, faced with the arrival (of a) pack”, a group of at least ten young men, armed and “galvanized by a feeling of omnipotence”, a underlined Olivier Auferil.
Some admitted that they robbed the clients of South American trans sex workers, which forced them to hire men to protect them. That evening, the leaders of the band wanted to “regain control of the territory by putting an end to the resistance of the prostitutes”, pointed out the general counsel.
“Contradicting Versions”
In this case where “several versions clash”, “contradictory, evolving versions”, the representative of the prosecution indicated to proceed “by deductions”. Who fired the stolen pistol a week before in a policeman’s car when he was with a prostitute? Is it Karim Ibrahim, as asserted – and he is the only one – Mahmoud Kadri, for whom his co-defendants “agreed” to designate him guilty?
This “conspiracy theory seems to me to have little credibility”, swept away the Advocate General, for whom “Mahmoud Kadri is the shooter” and Karim Ibrahim, who “had a driving role in the organization of the expedition”, his “partner in crime”.
Olivier Auféril asked that the accusation of “murder in an organized gang” reproached to a third man, Aymen Dib, be reclassified as participation in a criminal association, “no element” having according to him confirmed that he had indeed carried stabbing the victim.
His two-and-a-half-hour indictment, after fifteen days of a chaotic hearing marked by various incidents, was interrupted by insults towards him from one of the defendants, Mahmed A., who was once again expelled from the box. .
Any reproduction prohibited