“I am pleased that the Attorney General has joined us on our request to entrust a laboratory specializing in genetic portrait-robot and parentage DNA analysis,” Sylvie Noachovitch, the Moroccan gardener’s lawyer, told the media at the exit of the Court of Cassation.
Pardoned but never cleared, Omar Raddad still pleads his innocence and waits for justice to be done, multiplying legal battles in order to finally establish the truth, in a case that has seen new twists and turns in recent months.
On December 16, the French justice system decided to reopen the case, 27 years after the conviction of the former Moroccan gardener, ordering additional information after the defense had filed a trial review request relying on a report revealed by the press.
The report, prepared in 2019 by a private expert, concluded that there were about thirty traces of a complete male DNA not belonging to the gardener and found in the famous grammatically ill inscription “Omar m’a tuer” (Omar killed me) made with the blood of the victim, which designated Omar Raddad as the murderer.
The expert Laurent Breniaux, who analyzed 35 traces of one of the DNA present in the famous inscription favors, in his report, the hypothesis of a deposit of prints at the time of the facts, and not of a later “pollution” by the investigators.
In other words, these genetic traces could have been deposited by the author of the inscription, who would not be Marchal but potentially the real murderer, according to Noachovitch.
Sentenced in 1994 to 18 years imprisonment, Omar Raddad was partially pardoned by President Jacques Chirac, then conditionally released in 1998. But this pardon did not cancel the conviction and did not clear the Moroccan gardener. With no possibility of appeal at the time, he had spent more than seven years in prison.
