Who are the supermarket robbers? According to the verdict rendered this Friday evening by the Assize Court of Hauts-de-Seine: mystery. In any case, the three defendants tried since January 3 for a series of seventeen armed robberies, committed in supermarkets in Île-de-France in 2016 and 2017, are not the authors of all these robberies, concluded the jurors after two weeks of hearing.
Only Fessal A., 39, is convicted. Not for the whole series, far from it, but only for two facts. Those of March 18, 2017 committed in Val-de-Marne, in a Leclerc store, in Kremlin-Bicêtre, and at the Intermarché in Choisy-le-Roi.
It was the clothes worn by the robber, filmed by the CCTV of the stores, which convinced the jurors to convict him. In the images, the criminal, helmeted, wears an aviator jacket with a fur collar and logo, jeans with holes in several places, and black sneakers with white soles. This is exactly the outfit that Fessal A. wore when he left his home, a helmet in his hand, before the first robbery of the day, according to the photographs taken by the investigators then in hiding in front of his home, in Bourg-la-Reine .
For these two robberies committed a quarter of an hour apart, Fessal A. was sentenced to eight years in prison. Deemed free, he left free because the Assize Court did not issue a warrant of committal against this man, who has already spent four years in pre-trial detention before being tried.
Drawer teams
It must be said that the trial fell apart twice. First in April 2021, because a lawyer had contracted Covid, then last November after one of the defendants, who disappeared from radar, had been arrested. This defendant, who had not been found for a long time, was also acquitted, as requested by the Advocate General.
On the other hand, the magistrate had asked the jurors to declare Loris B., the lifelong friend of Fessal A., guilty for fifteen of the seventeen robberies in the series. Despite a body of elements converging on Fessal A. and Loris B. for these armed robberies, but without totally indisputable proof, the jurors acquitted him for all that he was accused of.
In the reasons for its decision, the court explains that the robberies were committed by teams with drawers, of which Loris B. was perhaps a part. But the testimonies of the victims who, for some, describe a robber with blue eyes and a North African accent, which Loris B. does not have, cannot allow him to be declared guilty.
The investigation was directed towards Fessal A. and Loris B. because ten years earlier, the two friends had been involved in a series of robberies committed according to the same modus operandi. The criminals always acted in pairs, arriving by scooter in the parking lot of the store. Without taking off his helmet, the first entered and harpooned an employee to be led to the vault.
The second entered a few seconds later to secure the premises. The robbers were almost never violent and distinguished themselves by their speed and mastery. They most often robbed two stores in the day, sometimes three, and let several days or weeks pass before starting again. For a total loot of around 160,000 euros.