Fanny Pollet was 86 years old and suffered from the onset of Alzheimer’s. Three men were sentenced to 17 and 18 years’ imprisonment on Friday January 15. They are accused of having tortured the widow of the founder of the Redoubt at his home in Hem (North) in January 2016, to extort in vain the contents of his safe. Fanny Pollet is died six months later.
On January 4, 2016 around 10:30 p.m., Rachid Belkhir and Aniss Tajer, two already convicted men aged 29 and 21, broke into the victim’s home. They tie up his home help and make Mrs. Pollet live an ordeal, disoriented, to give them the keys. The two men give him taser shots, mock drowning in his bathtub and blows to the head.
The attackers were at the same time in contact by telephone with Yacine Kherzane, then aged 30, never convicted and described by the prosecution as the instigator of this “homejacking”. He is watching in a car outside. For lack of keys, the duo leave around 3 o’clock in stealing one of Fanny Pollet’s cars, with 250 euros in cash, a bracelet and wedding rings, and joins Kherzane. They will be betrayed by their phones.
“They were attacking a woman they knew to be fragile and rich”, launched the lawyer general Juliette Lebon, after four days of debates in front of the Assize Court of the North, calling it “savagery” the act of the three men. The latter had required 18 years of criminal imprisonment against them. The court finally sentenced two of them, Rachid Belkhir and Aniss Tajer, at 17, and the third, Yacine Kherzane, at 18.
“Get up, get up, the trunk, the trunk!”
“She must have been terrified”, launched Me Olivier Péan de Ponfilly, lawyer for children and a grandson of Fanny Pollet, after having seized the court in fear by miming the scene. “Get up, get up, trunk, trunk!” He shouted, before tapping on a desk with a hairbrush to simulate the blows she received. “Of course she died because of that”, he assured, drawing the portrait of a “great lady”, “your grandmother”, who led a “life of toil, not a life of luxury or ostentation”.
Prostrated in the box, the three defendants apologized to the Pollet family and the carer, also civil party. “He participated in something monstrous, but it is not a monster”, pleaded Me Xavier Raes, lawyer for Aniss Tajer. “Mr. Belkhir, he’s a follower, stupid (…) He needs money, we offer him a plan, we tell him there is half a million euros in a safe, he says to himself ‘that can help me ‘”, pleaded Me Gaël Zouaoui stressing that” he confessed, wants and will pay. “
Finally, “Kherzane helped, but is certainly not the instigator”, repeated Me Chérifa Benmouffok, while the investigation could not determine if there was a sponsor above him or not.
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