Tuesday afternoon, at Lille judicial courtbetween the hearings of the mayors of Tourcoing and Villeneuve-d’Ascq, each prosecuted for defamation, the file of a person accused of drug trafficking. Besides that the affair, which can appear banal at first look, is extra shocking than it appears. By the character of the accused, the date of the details and, above all, by what appears like a giant dumpling of the judicial institution.
When he’s known as to the stand by the president of the courtroom, Mohamed S. doesn’t carry, neither in his look nor in his angle, the very heavy judicial pedigree which is his. Born in Cairo, Egypt, the person is just not an outdated man regardless of his 76 years. Denims, mild jacket, white hair, he stands a little bit hunched however speaks loudly, in damaged French. It’s when the president launches into itemizing her earlier convictions, all for drug circumstances, that we uncover that the septuagenarian is nothing like a six-week-old rabbit. The person has already spent 22 years behind bars. His title even seems within the famous affair of Commissioner Yves Jobicwrongly accused of corruption and pimping within the Nineteen Eighties.
Convicted by default in 2013
Mohamed S. in the present day says he’s “retired”, specifies that he suffers from a lung illness which requires common monitoring. If he finds himself within the dock, it’s as a result of his previous has caught up with him. In June 2025, throughout a police verify in Courbevoiethe brokers famous that he was topic to an OQTF.
By digging round a little bit, they found that he was additionally the topic of an arrest warrant courting from January 23, 2013. This was issued towards him within the context of a case of importation, transport, detention, acquisition and sale of narcotics, all as a repeat offender. Acts dedicated between January 2009 and October 2010 for which a trial was held in Lille in 2013, involving quite a few defendants, together with Mohamed S. Besides that the latter, who “had not been cited on the appropriate deal with”, in keeping with Me Soulifa Badaoui, his present lawyer, was not capable of seem. He was then sentenced in his absence to 4 years in jail.
The file can’t be discovered
Mohamed S. claims to have realized of his 2013 conviction throughout his arrest in June 2025. He instantly determined to file an opposition to this judgment, a process which permits him to be retried for the details with which he was accused on the time. Regardless of the OQTF and the arrest warrant, he was launched after his listening to. However in April 2026, he was arrested once more and positioned in pre-trial detention whereas awaiting his opposition listening to, set for Tuesday, Could 5, 2026.
However on the listening to, the palms of the president of the courtroom, the prosecutor and the protection lawyer are empty of the slightest doc regarding the case. “The providers point out that they’ve solely acquired the viewers ranking, and specify that the volumes of the file haven’t been discovered regardless of the searches carried out within the archives and within the e mail exchanges on the file,” explains to 20 Minutes Mr. Badaoui. Briefly: your entire process has disappeared and has remained untraceable for nearly a 12 months.
Subsequently, how can we choose Mohamed S. if we don’t even know what precisely he was accused of and what diploma of involvement he would have had on this drug trafficking? Unimaginable. Relying on a miracle exhumation of the file, the president postpones the case till September 30 and releases the accused underneath judicial supervision. “If the process is just not discovered by then, the courtroom could have no different alternative than to launch my shopper,” defined to 20 Minutes his lawyer, Me Soulifa Badaoui. Contacted, the prosecution didn’t present additional particulars.
