He is a liar and vicious. This is the judgement that emerges when you have a look at the arrest warrant for Maroof Easakhail, who is on trial at the Moselle jury court. The 33-year-old Afghan is on trial there from this Thursday for the murder of his partner Anita Gashi, who was 25 years old at the time of the crime and five months pregnant at the time on the 23rd of June 2022.
The man has always denied the allegations made against him: he is said to have set fire to the family’s flat in a residential building in Metz-Borny after luring his partner into a trap there, and at the same time to have created an ‘emergency exit’ for himself with the help of a bedsheet that was stuck under the window and hung on the façade. Moments before the neighbours heard a deflagration and saw black smoke billowing out of the window, they heard a woman shout ‘Stop it, stop it!’.
(…) a background to repeated arguments between this couple, who did not understand each other because they came from two different cultures. Maroof Easakhail seemed to reproach his partner of Kosovar descent for her ‘western clothes’ and ‘her openness towards others’.
A neighbour is said to have heard him calling the victim a “whore” and other witnesses reported violence against the woman during her second pregnancy and against the couple’s four-year-old child.
The child was not present in the flat at the time of the incident. According to the victim’s sister, Anita had confided in her that she wanted to separate from her partner. The man did not accept this decision and said: ‘In my country you don’t leave your husband, otherwise he kills his wife’, and confirmed his intention to go to Afghanistan with her (…).
Anita Gash died a month after the crime as a result of her injuries and could never be heard. The five-month-old foetus she was carrying was pronounced dead the day after the fire. The couple’s four-year-old child was taken into care.
The jury court of the Moselle department sentenced Maroof Easakhail to 25 years in prison for the murder of his pregnant partner Anita Gashi.
The sentence, which is below the demands of the Advocate General, who had called for 30 years in prison, is accompanied by a 12.5-year security sentence and a 15-year ban on the possession of firearms. (…)
For Cédric Lausmone, the motive for the crime lay neither ‘in a context of domestic violence – which did not really come to light in the investigation’ – nor in ‘Anita Gashi’s desire to leave him: after all, she wanted a second child with him’.
The Attorney General put forward a “cynical hypothesis” to explain the accused’s offence, that of a defendant who ‘wanted to get rid of his wife, who was no longer of any use to him, in cold blood, after he had had his son and obtained his residence permit! (…).