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Join on Telegram The highly mediatized case of Omar Raddad is once again under the spotlight after having been shrouded in mystery for over 30 years.
The affair started in Mougins, France, in 1991 after gardener Omar Raddad was arrested and convicted to 18 years of prison in 1994 for the murder of his employer Guislaine Marchal.
The case of Omar Raddad has remained at the center of public debate ever since.
Omar was convicted after investigators found two inscriptions written with the victim’s blood “Omar m’a tuer” on the crime scene. Omar has always maintained his innocence, despite the court ruling that found him guilty.
A new request for a court hearing was deposed this Thursday, June 24, by the lawyers of the Moroccan gardener. Even though Raddad benefited from a partial pardon by President Jacques Chirac and a conditional release in 1998, he is still regarded as guilty by the French justice system.
The call for a revision of the case of Omar Raddad came after a report that was published in 2019 provided empirical evidence of Omar Raddad’s innocence..
According to French newspaper le Monde, which had exclusive access to the data, the report concluded that the crime scene comprised about thirty traces of complete masculine DNA that did not belong to Raddad. Moreover, the same DNA traces were found on what became two famous inscriptions stating “Omar killed me.”
The inscription “Omar m’a tuer” had a grammatical error as it should normally be spelled “Omar m’a tuée.”This fact raised doubts as the case rose to national fame, as several french people maintained that a native speaker such as the murdered widow could not possibly have committed such an error.
At the time of the investigation, the inscription was deemed sufficient as proof of Raddad’s culpability. Omar, who was 27 at the time, was a Moroccan immigrant with a clean criminal record while having a reputation for his passion for casinos.
With the new evidence pointing to the presence of DNA that doesn’t belong to the accused, it appears that Raddad’s case was a setup to incriminate the gardener and divert the justice’s attention from the actual perpetrator.
“For 30 years, he has been waiting for a revision of his trial. That’s all his life is about now. He is depressed, it’s true, but today, he regained hope,” said his lawyer, Sylvie Noachovitch, to German television channel RTL.
The case was the subject of several books defending Raddad. The books criticized the weakness of the motive for the murder as presented by the prosecutor, a dispute between Marchal and her gardener regarding a modest sum of money.
The only elements that were relied on to condemn Omar were this weak motive and the two inscriptions “Omar m’a tuer.”
The case of Omar Raddad gained significant traction in public debate and has even served as an inspiration for the movie, “Omar m’a tuer,” by Roschdy Zem. The case took on a social and political dimension, and some even compared it to the Infamous Dreyfus Affair that divided French opinions at the start of the twentieth century.
“A hundred years ago, we condemned an officer because he had the bad luck of being Jewish, today we condemn a gardener because he had the bad luck of being Maghrebi,” said Raddad’s lawyer, Jacques Vergès in 1994.
The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal and miscarriage of justice in France in 1894 that saw Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French officer of Jewish descent, convicted for treason. The young officer was eventually acquitted after the justice identified the real culprit, but this case became widely renowned as a case of injustice and antisemitism.
During Raddad’s trial, his wife told the court that her husband was “incapable of hurting a fly,” to which Armand Fijian, the magistrate gave a shocking response, saying
“Yes, but that does not prevent him from knowing how to slaughter a sheep.”
Omar Raddad’s trial is a case that symbolizes more than just a miscarriage of justice. It represents a more significant trend of discrimination against and targeting of immigrants in France, in particular Muslim immigrants from the Maghreb.
