Algerian singer Souad Massi, author of the famous song Raouialso known for her album Mesk elil, released in 2005 and dedicated to exile and nostalgia for the native country, returns to the front of the stage. Not with a new album, but for a business that will have marked her throughout the last 5 years.
Her ex-husband, Abdellatif Z., indeed appeared on Wednesday March 1 before the Assize Court in Aix-en-Provence for having tried to kill their two children in 2017, taking to commit suicide thereafter. Under judicial control, today a VTC driver, the accused who appears free incurs life imprisonment. He did not take much time to recognize the facts: “I recognize the facts that are reproached to me”, he declared.
Souad Massi’s husband tries to poison their children
As a reminder, the facts date back to March 2017. Abdellatif Z. had tried to kill the two girls by gas poisoning. “I’m going to make you pay a lot of money, it’s all going to end,” he said to the two kids. They owe their salvation to the emergency services, which intervened in time after being alerted by their mother, Souad Massi, on a business trip.
The rescuers and the gendarmes then discover the girls – then aged 11 and 6 – unconscious in the sealed parental bedroom. Placed behind an armchair, a large gas bottle is emptied with a whistle. The father is found – also inanimate – on the floor of the living room. He had wounds on his left forearm. He is saved along with the two girls.
A half-burned cigarette, soaked in a flammable product, the floor and some of the walls of the house were also sprayed, was also found nearby. The investigation later showed that “if the product spread in the house had caught fire – which would have required a source of heat stronger than the simple lit cigarette – the family home could have been blown by an explosion due to gas”. That wouldn’t be all. It also turned out that the two girls had been drugged with drugs by their father.
Souad Massi and Abdellatif Z. – now 64 years old – married in 2005. Abdellatif had even been the manager of the Franco-Algerian singer, he who had worked as a taxi driver and manager of a brewery. The husband has always been described as depressed and suicidal, going through phases of massive alcoholism. His mental health has clearly deteriorated since Souad Massi had announced his intention to divorce a few months before the facts. According to a psychiatric examination, it is an “anxiety-depressive syndrome increased by increased alcohol consumption”.
