The Court of Cassation orders a new trial for Mohamed Lamine Aberouz in the Magnanville case

The Court of Cassation on Wednesday ordered the holding of a new trial on the sentence of Mohamed Lamine Aberouz, definitively convicted of complicity in the assassination in 2016 of a couple of police officers at their home in Magnanville (Yvelines), after having canceled one of the counts of guilt for formal defects and therefore his life imprisonment.

Mohamed Lamine Aberouz, who has always maintained his innocence, was sentenced on appeal in June 2025 to life imprisonment with a security period of 22 years, for complicity in the assassination of a person holding public authority, complicity in the kidnapping of a minor under the age of 15 and terrorist criminal association.

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On the evening of June 13, 2016, Jessica Schneider, 36, a police officer at the Mantes-la-Jolie police station (Yvelines), had her throat slit at her home in front of her three-year-old son. A little later, his companion, Jean-Baptiste Salvaing, 42, commander at the Mureaux police station, was stabbed nine times as he was preparing to return home. The same assassin: Larossi Abballa, friend of the accused shot dead by RAID police officers who intervened to free the child.

A rare decision

A follower of rigorous Islam, already convicted in a jihadist attack case, Mohamed Lamine Aberouz has continued to proclaim his innocence in this affair, affirming that Abballa had acted alone. His lawyers filed a cassation appeal to challenge this conviction. In its judgment rendered on Wednesday and consulted by AFP, the highest court ratified the bulk of the conviction of Mohamed Lamine Aberouz but annulled the declaration of his guilt for complicity in the kidnapping of the couple's child due to a nullity, relating to an aspect of editorial form.

The Court of Cassation in fact partially overturned the judgment of the Assize Court due to a “discrepancy” between the sheet of questions to be answered by the jury and the decision as written. She therefore quashed the sentence handed down against him and ordered a new trial for Mohamed Lamine Aberouz, which will relate only to the disputed charge.

“This is an extremely rare decision. If it only concerns, on paper, a technical point, it opens the way to a new trial which will allow the decisive question of the presence of Mr. Aberouz on the scene and, consequently, that of his participation in the facts with which he is accused to be put back into debate,” reacted his lawyers, Vincent Brengarth and Nino Arnaud. “Since the start of this affair, (Mr. Aberouz) has continued to reaffirm his perfect innocence and to maintain that he was not on the scene (...) We will do everything possible so that this truth can finally be established,” they said.