After eight days of trial, eleven men and a woman, aged 25 to 39, were sentenced on Friday April 21 to six to ten years in prison for trafficking in cannabis and cocaine in 2020 and 2021 in the city. des Boute-en-Train, in Saint-Ouen, one of the main deal points in Seine-Saint-Denis until its evacuation in 2021.
This drug supermarket at the gates of Paris, open 24 hours a day, constituted according to the prosecution “the most successful version of city traffic”. After a trial marked by “a scrupulous application of the law of silence”the Bobigny criminal court in Seine-Saint-Denis found the defendants guilty for their involvement, to varying degrees, in this traffic “extremely lucrative”.
For the nine months covered by the procedure alone, turnover can thus be assessed at “five-six million euros”detailed the president of the hearing, Jean-Baptiste Acchiardi.
Ten years in prison for the alleged leader of the network, on the run
Owner of the deal point and head of the “Boutes” network, El Mehdi Zouhairi, alias “Le Gros” or “Unsain”, was sentenced to the maximum penalty of ten years in prison because of his “particularly dangerous”, as well as a fine of two million euros. This 33-year-old rap producer was not present at the hearing. On the run in Morocco since the assassination in 2019 of the head of a rival clan in the Saint-Ouen deal, he continues to escape French justice despite multiple arrest warrants and legal proceedings against him.
Detained since his arrest at the end of 2020 after months of wiretapping, his right-hand man “Mojito”, who managed day-to-day traffic in Saint-Ouen and carried out the orders given remotely by “Le Gros”, was sentenced to seven years imprisonment and a fine of 200,000 euros. “Retaining the association of criminals and cocaine trafficking is a factual and legal aberration”lamented to Agence France-Presse his lawyer, Yassine Bouzrou.
Read more
