Rapper Koba LaD, who was involved in a road accident that killed his passenger, will be tried on Wednesday.

Driving a luxury sports sedan and testing positive for cannabis, the 25-year-old musician crashed at high speed into a truck that was stopped on a gas station exit ramp. The front passenger died, and a passenger, his girlfriend sitting in the back, suffered minor injuries.

The defense intends to qualify during the hearing the two circumstances that aggravate the involuntary manslaughter charged against Koba LaD (Marcel Junior Loutarila in civil status): excessive speed and drug use. The toxicological analysis carried out after the accident detected in his blood a concentration of THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, of 1.1 nanograms per milliliter, according to a source close to the case. "These results are compatible (according to an expert report commissioned by the defense, editor's note) with a ten-day history of consumption; Marcel Loutarila was in his normal state when he got behind the wheel," assures Arthur Vercken, who is defending the artist with Stéphane Cherqui.

The rapper, who has three million monthly listeners on Spotify, is currently in pre-trial detention in connection with this case.

This trial is not the first case for which Koba LaD has faced justice: he has already received several convictions, including for another car accident.

In January, the Melun Criminal Court (Seine-et-Marne) sentenced him to 15 months in prison for assaulting his long-time manager in 2022. A month earlier, he had been sentenced to three months in prison for drugs found in his cell.

He was also sentenced in September 2024 to one year in prison in Paris for other acts of violence, this time in a nightclub in the capital, two years earlier.

Another car accident in which he was involved led to his three-month suspended prison sentence in Marseille in 2020.

Recently, his name has also emerged in connection with the escape of drug trafficker Mohamed Amra, which cost the lives of two prison officers at the Incarville toll booth (Eure) on May 14, 2024: Koba LaD was indicted in March in this case alongside five other people and placed under judicial supervision. He is being prosecuted for conspiracy to commit an offense punishable by five years' imprisonment.

This indictment "is simply not based on anything," denounced Mr. Cherqui and Mr. Vercken, judging that the rapper was only placed under this status "because of his notoriety and on the sole pretext that he knows the protagonists of the case." Some suspects in this case are suspected of belonging to the Black Manjak Family, presented as a criminal organization based in Normandy and specialized in narcotics with possible links to Koba LaD.