He fled on December 14 after hitting 14-year-old Aymen. William C. has just been indicted and imprisoned, the Montpellier prosecutor’s office announced on Tuesday. This 20-year-old man was “indicted for charges of intentional violence with a weapon resulting in death without the intention of giving it” and placed in pre-trial detention, said Fabrice Bélargent, Montpellier prosecutor.
The imprisoned young man was indicted for a second count of “willful violence with a weapon resulting in total incapacity for work for more than eight days”, also indicated the prosecutor, who did not specify how many people were injured. by his vehicle on the evening of the match. According to Fabrice Bélargent, William C. “made no statement during his first appearance interrogation”. He has already been prosecuted in 2021 for lack of driver’s license and lack of insurance.
Asked by AFP, his lawyer, Jean-Baptiste Mousset, said he “did not wish to comment on the charges.”
“A great relief” for Aymen’s family
The driver is suspected of being the cause of Aymen’s death in mid-December, during the celebrations of the semi-final of the World Cup which had opposed France to Morocco. The arrest was eagerly awaited by the teenager’s family. “It is a great relief because we now know that he is arrested and that justice will be done, that he will be punished, that he will receive, I hope, a sentence worthy of what he committed, ”reacted to AFP Saïd, Aymen’s brother.
“I place all my trust in my lawyer and in justice. It is not a question of revenge, simply that justice be done, even if it is not by stopping it that it will bring us back our little one, ”added Saïd, who manages the snack bar near which his brother was killed. kill. “Aymen was coming out of the snack bar where he had watched the match when he was hit and crushed. He was not part of the group that surrounded the vehicle, ”said family lawyer Marc Gallix on Tuesday. The latter will be a civil party on behalf of the family on Tuesday, in particular to have access to the file, he said.
Several days on the run in Spain
After several days on the run, William C. was arrested early Tuesday morning at the Spanish border. The investigators, who had quickly acquired the conviction that the driver was in Spain, saw him around 3 am, in a vehicle. The police followed him to Saint-Estève, a town near Perpignan, and arrested him around 6 a.m. without difficulty, in a house. Targeted by an arrest warrant, the man was directly presented to a judge.
On the circumstances of the facts, the police favor at this stage the hypothesis of an accident, a panic attack.
After the teenager’s death, scuffles took place in two disadvantaged neighborhoods of Montpellier, including La Paillade, where the accident took place. The prefect then called for “calm” and “appeasement” and denounced in passing the “untruths and false information (which) circulate on social networks, helping to excite the spirits”.