Omar Raddad Affair

The Omar Raddad Affair was a highly publicised criminal trial in Mougins, France in 1991. After the murder of Ghislaine Marchal, Marchal's gardener Omar Raddad was arrested. Defended at his trial by Jacques Vergès, Raddad was convicted 1994, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Raddad always maintained his innocence. Raddad received a partial pardon from French President Jacques Chirac in 1996 at the request of Moroccan King Hassan II, which reduced his sentence to 4 years and 8 months, and was released from prison in 1998.

The misspelled sentence "Omar m'a tuer" ("Omar killed me"), found written in blood at the crime scene, became a widely used phrase in French society during the 1990s. The last word of the sentence is not properly conjugated; it should read: "Omar m'a tuée". Skeptics contended that this is an odd mistake for a native French speaker to make. The mistake is understandable, however, since both tuer and tuée are pronounced [ty.e]. The case was the subject of the 2011 film Omar m'a tuer by Roschdy Zem.

Description of the events

The facts

Born Ghislaine de Renty, Ghislaine Marchal was the daughter of an industrialist who was engaged in the Resistance during the Second World War and died in deportation. Divorced from her first husband, with whom she had a son, in 1991 she was the wealthy widow of Jean-Pierre Marchal, owner of a famous company that supplied equipment for automobiles, and sister-in-law of the president of the Paris Bar Council Bernard de Bigault du Granrut. She split her time between her main house in Switzerland and her villa La Chamade, which she had built in the hills of Mougins.

Ghislaine Marchal disappeared

On Sunday 23 June 1991, around 11:48am, Ghislaine Marchal, having just got out of the shower, is chatting on the phone with her friend Erika S. She has planned for her friend to come to La Chamade for lunch on monday morning. Ghislaine Marchal tells her she is in a hurry as she needs to get ready to have lunch at her friends' Mr and Mrs K.'s house at 1pm. They end their conversation at 11:50. This will be the last time that her voice was heard by those close to her.

Surprised that she hadn't arrived, her friends called her in vain several times from 13:30 onwards. Around 6, Colette K. drove to La Chamade. She rang the doorbell but nobody answered, nor did they to another phone call she made that evening.

On Monday 24 June, Erika S. arrived at 11:30, as planned. She rang, rang again, called, all in vain. Alerted by Mrs Erika S. and Mrs Colette K., a third friend, Francine P., sent an employee of the security company to the house in the early afternoon. The house, dark and silent, shows no trace of a break in, the blinds had only been drawn in the bedroom; on the unmade bed were glasses, a diary; the breakfast tray is in the kitchen. The keys are in the door, which remains unlocked, the alarm is not activated. It seemed as though Ghislaine Marchal had just woken up, but she wasn't there. Throughout the afternoon, the searching begins; the security company employee returns with Francine P. and her attendant. They are quickly joined by Ghislaine Marchal's doctor. They find jewelry, an open hand bag, which doesn't contain any cash, but no trace of the owner.

The cellar door is blocked from inside

Finally, on 24 June 1991 in the evening, the police are alerted and arrive at the house. After searching the house, they become interested in an annexe to the main house. A flight of stairs descends to the cellar, which had not been visited as of yet, and of which the metal door is locked. After unlocking it, the door would still not open any more than 2 cm. One officer pushed with all his might as another feeds his arm through the gap and identifies a folding bed placed against the door on the inside. He manages to violently push it backwards: the door opens a little bit more, but a metal tube, placed on the ground perpendicularly to the door, firmly blocks it on its hinges. The door was warped and twisted by the officer's pushing, enabling him to get a leg through the gap and ''kicking the tube several times''. The final kicks shifts the tube, enabling him to open the door. In January 1992, investigators note that '' the pressure on the door made the tube move, leaving a semi circular imprint on the cement floor''.

Discovery of the body

At the back of the cellar, Ghislaine Marchal is lying face down, her legs pointing to the bag wall, her arms stretched out in front of her on the ground, dressed in only a blood stained bath robe pulled up to above her waist.

The doctor's first observations on the evening of the 24th, and the autopsy of 28 June revealed severe injuries: 5 violent blows to the head, carried out with a rafter, ''to kill and not to knock her out'' which caused open cuts on her head and cerebral edema, a V shaped cut on her throat, which missed the trachea and the big arteries of the neck; ten cuts on her thorax and on the abdomen, caused by a ''double edged tapered blade'' measuring 15 to 20cm long, and maximum of 2cm wide, which provoked an eventration and three cuts into the liver; two into her left thigh, one of which produced a thin stream of blood perpendicular to the axle of the leg; the victim thus lay on the floor immobile after having received this injury, for at least long enough for the blood to coagulate, approximately 7 minutes. Injuries and fractures of the hands, a phalange almost ripped off, suggest that she looked to protect herself by bringing her hands to her face, several scrapes on her arms and legs, in particular on the soles of her feet and the back of her knees, as well as traces of dust and cement on her robe suggest that the victim had been dragged on the ground.

Forensic experts note that it had not been possible to determine the order in which the blows were delivered. None of them were immediately fatal, but were after approximately 15 to 30 minutes of agony. Captain Georges Cenci notes that the assassin seemed 'determined, but also clumsy in his movements'.

Doctor Jean Pagliuzza, forensic doctor, who had been consulted by the defense lawyers accepted to give his advice to journalist Eve Livet after the gardener was sentenced. He thinks that the murder could have happened in a rapid sequence of only 3 to four minutes. In this type of attack, the first blows have the intention of neutralising the victim by stunning her. After this, the blows carried out with a white weapon follow, very quickly. 'Taking into account the force of the blows, her aggressor was a man [...] he was left handed'. He indicates that the lowest injury was the first to be made. 'The blade hit higher and higher the more the victim collapsed'. The V shaped injury on her neck 'is often found in this type of murder' because of the lateral movement of the head, looking to escape the blows to the neck. The expert specifies that the attacker must certainly have received blood on him. Given the way the blood flowed following this, he estimates that the victim never got up; she died 'rapidly from bleeding'. If she had stood up, the haemorrhage of the liver would have filled the abdominal cavity, something which was not observed by forensic scientists.

Discovery of the inscriptions 'Omar killed me'

The cellar's metal door opens onto a hallway. On the left 'Omar m'a tuer' is written in blood, in well formed letters, one meter above ground level, on a locked white door leading to the wine cellar. A bloody trace is visible under the inscription. In front of the metal door, at the back of the main room, the sentence is partially written again on the door of the boiler room: 'Omar m'a t'. This 'second inscription' as the investigators called it, lower than the first, is barely legible. It is situated on the boiler room's side of the door, but because the door is blocked open, it is facing the entrance of the room and not the boiler room, where the body is.

References

• Lichfield, John (3 August 2010). "Who really killed Ghislaine Marchal?". The Independent.