A thirty-something with an erratic course was sentenced yesterday to 25 years of criminal imprisonment by the assizes of the Hérault for the assassination in 2017 of Joaquim, a 20-year-old student with whom he had just had an altercation in a street in Montpellier .
The Assize Court accompanied the sentence with a two-thirds security measure and an obligation of socio-judicial monitoring and care for 10 years. If the convict did not respect this obligation, he would be liable to five additional years of imprisonment, warned the president.
Tuesday, Advocate General Denis Mondon had requested 25 to 30 years imprisonment with a two-thirds security period against Mohamed Guendouz, believing that this 31-year-old man represented for the company a “time bomb” after a life lonely marked by breakups, violence, drugs and alcohol.
An uprooted, unable to read or write
The psychiatrist expert highlighted during the trial the “significant and persistent societal danger” of this man condemned several times for violence, in particular attacks with a knife.
Yesterday, before the verdict, the accused, a slender figure dressed in gray, expressed regret for having “broken” a family in this affair which had aroused great emotion in Montpellier. The lawyers appointed to this man who could neither read nor write, challenged the premeditation. They underlined the extreme loneliness of the accused who never found his place in France after being uprooted at the age of 16 from the village of Aurès (Algeria) where he was raised by his Kabyle grandfather.
The assassination, committed on November 2, 2017 in a busy street in the historic center a little before 10 p.m., was filmed by surveillance cameras: Mohamed Guendouz first intervenes in an argument between Joaquim and his girlfriend in a rue du quartier Gambetta.
After an exchange of blows, the man walks away while the young geography student leaves for the historic center with a friend. A few minutes later, Mohamed Guendouz goes up the rue Saint-Guilhem, running barefoot and armed with a large knife. He deals several blows to the student, who dies before help arrives.
At the helm, the mother of the young cello player delivered a poignant testimony. Argentinian translator, she explained that, like many women from her country of origin, the mothers of the disappeared from the dictatorship (1976-1983), she would henceforth “carry the memory” of her murdered son “in atrocious conditions” .
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