Sentenced to 25 years in prison for having killed his childhood friend Medhi Ettir with a knife in 2011 in Belleville, the Franco-Moroccan, Hassan Benhamza, who pretended to be dead, has just been arrested in Morocco.
In effect, on June 11, 2011, Hassan Benhamza apparently committed suicide, in Morocco, eaten away by remorse. The victim was 23 years old at the time of the crime. At the origin of the drama, a disagreement between longtime friends following a story… of a dog, a pit bull in this case.
According to his girlfriend, Hassan had let himself die in a barn in Morocco, without water or electricity, while swallowing drugs, a few months after killing his friend Medhi Ettir in Paris. This thesis had been supported by a death certificate issued by a district council of the municipality of Rabat. It was his younger brother who provided the document to the second district of the judicial police (DPJ) of Paris. But trickery is fast discovery.
It is, indeed, bullshit! The Parisian investigators do not believe this story and are continuing their investigations. Relatives and family are wiretapped and the investigation ends with a court trial where the “living dead” murderer is sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment in absentia. over there Paris Assize Court. Hassan never reappeared in France and for good reason, lhe dead who was alive and well, was taking it easy somewhere in Morocco.
Denounce or cover one of their own? This was the Shakespearian question that tormented the mind of the Benhamza clan. Parents and brothers of the young murderer did not resist the call of blood. So they made up his death to save him from prison. On July 12, 2011, French justice then sent a request for cooperation to Morocco via Interpol. A week later, the father telephones the French police.
He introduced himself as ” police officer at the rank of comptroller general and explained that his son’s death had been recorded and that the place where he was buried was unfortunately difficult to access. Later, during a hospitalization in France, he will personally confirm to the investigators the death of his son.
His family and relatives on the other hand – his mother and his two brothers and his ex-girlfriend – answered for their actions, in 2017, before the Paris Criminal Court. Strangely, the father, a senior police official, would not have been worried, protected in this by his diplomatic immunity. He had indeed officiated for eight years at the Moroccan Embassy in Paris, according to the magazine Le Point.
That said, the verdict gave fifteen months in prison for one of the brothers (the one who had issued the death certificate), twelve months in prison suspended for the mother, the other brother and the ex- girlfriend (young mother of a little girl born during school) for “false testimonies, forgery and use of forgery”.
The Benhamza family paid dearly for a complicity that blood does not excuse. The father was heard in Morocco by the French police, and would have declared that the family had set up this scenario under the threat of the murderous son.
The latter would have chose to flee to Morocco via Italy without ever returning to France. And because he has Moroccan nationality, extradition may be impossible to the chagrin of French justice. Once again, it is the mastery in the execution of the work of the DGSN (General Directorate of National Security) that prevailed to expose this gigantic trickery.
Almost 12 years later and while an international arrest warrant had been running since March 2014, the case of the “living dead” has finally come to an end. Hassan Benhamza, 34, was caught by the BNPJ and arrested and is expected to be extradited.