A drug trafficker from Marseille has been extradited from Morocco to France. Indeed Karim Harrat, a 34-year-old Franco-Algerian, suspected of being involved in four settling of scores, was handed over to France by the judicial authorities of Morocco and is currently in Paris before his judges, at least those responsible for the fight against drug trafficking.
The one who was considered to be one of the most illustrious fugitives from France, the Marseillais Karim Harrat in this case, arrested on November 14, 2021, at Casablanca airport, on the basis of a European arrest warrant, was handed over to the French authorities on Tuesday February 14. The extradition procedure lasted more than a year. He would be involved in four cases of settling of accounts having made a total of seven dead, intentional homicides in an organized gang committed between December 2018 and December 2020.
The legal agenda of the one nicknamed “Le Rent” or “Ara-fat” promises to be dense in the coming weeks, indicates Le Monde. As soon as he steps on French soil, he should report to the Paris court, to the examining magistrate Matthieu Bonduelle who is investigating the assassination of Florent N’Gondo. The latter, a 30-year-old Marseillais died, on December 2, 2018, of twenty-five shots from automatic weapons, at the exit of a shisha bar on the 20e district of Paris. Florent N’Gondo would have been killed for not having paid his due to Karim Harrat.
If this case concerns the French capital, he will also have to respond to others and not the least, in particular in Marseilles where he is wanted in the context of three cases investigated by the examining magistrate Antoine Derieux. In November 2021, the public prosecutor of Marseille, Dominique Laurens, spoke of him as “ an extremely important individual in the context of the investigations” on drug trafficking. He will be questioned about a possible role played in a triple homicide committed in December 2020 in Châteauneuf-les-Martigues (Bouches-du-Rhône), near Marseille.
Like young traffickers in a hurry who are impatient to play the leading roles and kill each other with Kalashnikovs, he will climb the ladder quickly. At the start of his “career”, his criminal record only reflected a small past as a bank card thief. But he quickly cut his teeth in the shadow of the traffic of the Bassens city, one of the most important in Marseille. He will take advantage of the arrest of the chiefs for settling scores, to supplant them in business.
According to “Tatoo”, nickname of a repentant trafficker “ today, the head of the pyramid is Karim Harrat, but at that time, he was still the dog of the gang. That’s why it’s called Rantanplan or Le Rent”. Karim Harrat is suspected of having pulled the strings of young people eager to “own” a network, their Holy Grail, from abroad. Tatoo will add that “the barons send little young people to the fire and they watch these little young people being killed. These latter are unconscious, they idolize them.”
The magistrates therefore have many questions to ask Karim Harrat, including a fourth murder file, that of Moussef Moussa killed on August 3, 2020 on the A7, in the northern districts of Marseille. He was 19 years old. He will also have to explain the death of Farid Tir killed in a hotel room near Marseille in August 2019, whom he accused of the death of his brother Karim Seghier, in 2010 in the Font-Vert city.