“A hundred years ago, an officer was condemned because he was Jewish, today a gardener is condemned because he is North African,” said Vergès, who was known for his sensational media appearances. A symbol of discriminationĪt the time of Raddad’s conviction in 1994, his legal counsel, celebrity French lawyer Jacques Vergès, caused an uproar by comparing his client’s case to the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army captain was accused of spying for Germany during a period of heightened anti-Jewish sentiment in France. The case quickly took on a sociopolitical dimension, pitting two diametrically opposed worlds against each other: On the one hand, a poor Moroccan immigrant who spoke halting French, and on the other, a wealthy family from the Côte d’Azur. But instead of using the past participle for the word “killed”, the inscription used the infinitive.įor prosecutors, the message was enough to incriminate Omar Raddad, Marchal’s gardener at the time. But defence lawyers argued it was highly unlikely that Marchal, a wealthy and educated widow, would make such a mistake, fuelling intense speculation that Raddad – who was found guilty and sentenced to 18 years in jail – had been framed. When police found the 65-year-old stabbed to death in the cellar of her villa on the French Riviera, they discovered two messages scrawled on a door in Marchal’s blood that read: “Omar m’a tuer” and “Omar m’a t-” (“Omar killed me”). The 1991 murder of Ghislaine Marchal, a wealthy widow of a car manufacturer, was made famous by a simple grammatical mistake.
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