Woman burned alive in Metz: husband sentenced to twenty-five years in prison
On Friday, June 6, the Moselle Assize Court sentenced Maroof Easakhail to twenty-five years in prison for the murder of his pregnant partner, Anita Gashi, in the arson attack on their apartment in June 2022.
The court found him guilty of murder of a spouse and retained the intention to kill, which the 33-year-old Afghan had tried to deny during his trial.
The sentence, lower than the demands of the attorney general, Cédric Lausmone, who had requested thirty years of imprisonment, is accompanied by a security period of twelve and a half years, and a ban on possessing a weapon for fifteen years.
Five months pregnant, Anita Gashi, who suffered severe burns, lost her unborn child the day after the tragedy. Suffering over 90% third-degree burns, she died from her injuries a month later. She was never heard from.
Many contradictionsMaroof Easakhail changed his story several times during the proceedings. During the trial, he admitted for the first time to setting fire to their home, claiming that he and his partner had orchestrated insurance fraud but never intended to kill her.
"We did not believe your version at all, which is full of contradictions and inconsistencies. It is a montage, a creation, to adapt you to the evidence put forward against you," the president of the court, Nicolas Faltot, told him.
"A pure fabrication," also considered the attorney general, Cédric Lausmone, who noted that in the social housing occupied by the couple, there was "no object of great value in the apartment which would have given rise to enormous compensation."
Furthermore, investigators noted that Maroof Easakhail showed no signs of burns or soot, even though he claimed to have done everything to save his partner.
For Cédric Lausmone, the motive for the crime does not lie "in a context of domestic violence - which is not really highlighted in the investigation" - or in "Anita Gashi's desire to leave him: she wanted a second child from him" .
The attorney general put forward a "cynical hypothesis" to explain his actions, that of an accused who "wanted to cold-bloodedly get rid of his wife, who was no longer of any use to him, after having obtained his son and his residence permit!"
"What is unbearable in his underhanded version is that he includes Anita," stressed in her plea Ms. Samira Boudiba, counsel for the victim's family, who traveled by bus from Serbia to "attend the trial of the murderer of their daughter and sister."
"By killing Anita Gashi, he killed part of his son," argued Ms. Zakia Ait Ali Slimane, a lawyer representing the rights of the couple's first child, a 7-year-old boy, "full of anger and sadness, who lost his mother, his little brother and whose future is uncertain."
The World with AFP
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