The Bouches-du-Rhône Court of Appeal sentenced Mohamed Seghier, 46, and Juan-Gino Martí, 42, on the night of Friday to Saturday, September 21, to thirty years in prison for the murder committed by an organized gang of the rapper Jul’s manager in 2014. The appeal juries thus increased the twenty-five-year prison sentence they had imposed on them in March 2023.
The two defendants have vehemently denied their involvement in the murder of Karim Tir, aged 30, shot dead at the wheel of his vehicle by men riding a motorcycle in front of a metro station on 12 June 2014 in Asnières-sur-Seine (Hautes-de-Seine).
“I am a car thief, I might commit a robbery but I am not a murderer”Mohamed Seghier, presented by the judicial police as one of the influential members of a team of criminals from Marignane (Bouches-du-Rhône), a town near Marseille, insisted during the proceedings.
Karim Tir, released from prison two years earlier after serving a five-year sentence for drug trafficking, had devoted himself to music production, becoming Jul’s manager in particular, whose career was just beginning to develop.
Will for revenge
The Attorney General, Christophe Raffin, who had requested thirty years of imprisonment against the two accused, included this murder in a “vendetta”a bloody conflict between two criminal gangs from Marseille involved in drug trafficking. “The Tir and the Remadnia, it is their dispute, I have nothing to do with them”Mohamed Seghier contradicted the police, while the prosecution claimed that his involvement was due to a desire to avenge the murder of his brother Karim Seghier in August 2010.
Detailing the circumstances of Karim Tir’s murder, the first criminal court, in March 2023, found that “The shooter seen limping on the CCTV footage can only be Zakary Remadnia”a young man shot dead a few months later in Marseille.
Mohamed Seghier had left him there beforehand. The court of first instance also named Juan Martí as the experienced driver of the motorcycle who took the shooter away after the shooting, a role questioned by Mr Anna-Maria Sollacaro and Mr Antoine Guglielmi, who asked for his acquittal.
Mohamed Seghier’s lawyers, Pascal Roubaud and Mehdi Khezami, also called for his acquittal. “The debates did not allow us to say where Mohamed Seghier was at the crime scene”Me Roubaud said after the verdict, regretting that “The court ruled without being able to determine the exact role” from your client.
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A third defendant was sentenced to four years in prison, including two years suspended, for conspiracy to commit a crime, although he had been acquitted at first instance. Jul, a rap star from Marseille, will have to pay a fine of 3,000 euros for refusing to appear as a witness in this appeal trial.
