He was the one who first shot Federico Martin Aramburu on Boulevard Saint-Germain. He fired four times, hitting the former rugby player twice, in the right thigh and in the chest, during this tragic night in March 2022. But he was not the one who killed. However, did Romain Bouvier try to do it? And had he premeditated it? “At no time did I want to harm him. I just wanted to take my friend and leave,” assured this arms collector during his interrogation before the Paris Assize Court on Tuesday September 22. This friend is Loïk Le Priol, tried alongside him for murder, when he is accused of attempted murder. They both face life imprisonment.
After a fight on the terrace of the Parisian bar Le Mabillon with Biarritz rugby players, the two ultra-right activists separated. And Romain Bouvier, 35 years old today, then imagined "the worst" for his "war hero". "I am in fear which is starting to rise to a crescendo. Fear for Loïk. Where is he? And in what state is he? (...) Was he beaten to death?" In court, the man who dreamed of being a lawyer pleaded his “truth”. Fear, “that’s what I experienced and felt in my subjectivity of the moment,” swears Romain Bouvier.
“Everything was going well in the best of all possible worlds”
A few minutes earlier, his state of mind was completely different, rewinds Romain Bouvier. When he goes on cocktails based on "rum" with Loïk Le Priol and Lyson Rochemir, accused of complicity in an assassination attempt in this affair, he is a thousand miles from imagining the turn that the evening will take. Even when Federico Martin Aramburu and Shaun Hegarty moved in next to them, “everything was going well in the best of all possible worlds”.
“I have absolutely no recollection of any violence brewing.”
Romain Bouvier, accused of attempted assassination
before the Paris Assize Court
He didn't see Loïk Le Priol patting Shaun Hegarty on the cheek. So, when Federico Martin Aramburu grabs his friend's hood to make him fall, Romain Bouvier is "taken aback". A fight breaks out in front of him. "I'm starting to be completely confused. Very quickly, I get up, I still have my cigarette in my hand. I get closer. (...) I take a huge punch in the face", reports the accused, "groggy" from the blow. The fight is short but violent, three waiters from Mabillon and the bouncer separate them.
Loïk Le Priol disappears from his field of vision. Romain Bouvier gets into a Jeep driven by Lyson Rochemir. His intention at this precise moment, he says, is not to fight again, but to help his friend who he thinks is in danger. He imagines "Loïk [Le Priol] on the ground with our two attackers beating him up. (...) This is how I visualize the scene in relation to what has just been said to me and what I have just experienced." However, where the Jeep stops, Loïk Le Priol is not there. And if Romain Bouvier had any doubts, the president of the Assize Court asked him: why not shout “Where are you Loïk?” “I’m paralyzed,” replies the person concerned from his box.
“I provoked the shots which brought him back”
Romain Bouvier gets out of the car and takes out his revolver in front of Federico Martin Aramburu. According to him, the ex-rugby player is “advancing” on him, wants to “get in touch”. "He said to me: 'You're dead', and very sincerely, I took him at his word, Romain Bouvier told the court. There was a total panic which drove me crazy, to the point that instinctively I took out my weapon. I shot at the ground so that he would back away. In my mind, it was so that he could see the flame of the fire, so that he could hear the explosions." He fired four times in four seconds, with “a deterrent intention”, the former law student still insists. "I never wanted to touch him. All I wanted to do was touch the ground so he would get as much distance from me as possible."
Video surveillance images are projected. However, they show Federico Martin Aramburu retreating clearly from the first shot, while Romain Bouvier has his arm outstretched. “Between what I wanted to do and what I actually did, there is a world of difference,” admits the man with the shaved head, also insisting on the idea that he was able to shoot with his arm outstretched but his wrist down. “Like an idiot, I got myself into this mess.”
Faced with insistent questions from the president of the court on whether or not he intended to kill, the co-accused became impatient. “I never wanted to kill Mr. Aramburu! At some point, this relentlessness is too much!” Romain Bouvier "deserves" prison, he believes, but only for what he did, violence with a weapon, not for the qualification of attempted assassination retained by the investigating judges.
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His “clumsiness”, by touching and injuring the athlete, has caused him “immense guilt” for four and a half years. “I would like to tell Mr. Aramburu's family that I think of them every day, and that I do not even dare look at them for fear of offending them,” he declares, his back to the civil parties. Romain Bouvier has long remade the film of the night of March 19, 2022. If he had not fired four times in the direction of the ex-rugby player, would the six other detonations of Loïk Le Priol (including the fatal shot) have taken place? The co-accused is convinced: “I provoked the shots which brought him back. If I had not fired, Mr. Aramburu would still be with his children”.
