The Chilean accused was sentenced at first instance to twenty-eight years’ imprisonment for having killed the Japanese student, in Besançon, in 2016. The question is whether, and how, the fortress he had opposed the evidence combined against him will hold.
by Pascale Robert-Diard
For the jurors before which he will appeal, before the Assize Court of Haute-Saône, in Vesoul, as of Tuesday, February 21, Nicolas Zepeda is an alleged innocent accused of the assassination of his former little Friend Narumi Kurosaki, on the night of December 4 to 5, 2016, in Besançon. For the Advocate General Etienne Manteaux, who takes up the seat of the accusation after having requested against him thirty years of imprisonment at first instance before the Assizes of the Doubs, as for the civil parties (the mother, the sister of the student Japanese and her French lover), Nicolas Zepeda is an assassin frozen in denial. And for all those who attended the first trial at the end of which the 32-year-old Chilean was sentenced to twenty-eight years of imprisonment, the question is whether, and how, the fortress he had opposed to the vertigo of evidence combined against him, will hold.
The body of Narumi Kurosaki has never been found since this evening in December 2016 when she returned with Nicolas Zepeda in Chamber 106 of her university residence in Besançon. But his death is horoded by the cries of terror who woke up his eleven immediate neighbors, and as evidenced by the distraught messages that they exchanged between 3:18 and 3:26, on December 4, 2016.
During the investigation, as during his first trial, Nicolas Zepeda recognized only a few evidences. He took a flight from Santiago from Chile to Geneva, via Madrid, then a train to Lyon, where he rented a car and rolled to Besançon, without warning Narumi Kurosaki from his arrival. He invited her to the restaurant and spent twenty-nine hours head-on with her, in the 9 m 2 of his room, before hitting the road and returning to Chile. His cries? “We made love all night, she was very expressive,” he said. For everything else, the unexplained disappearance of Narumi and that of the sheets in his bed, while the bag and the clothes of the young woman were found in her room, he is not concerned, he always said .
“I’m not that person”
But facing the courtyard, the ease of the young Chilean tie, of the nomadic and multilingual student from an easy and Catholic family, had stumbled on the other elements of the file. The weeks of harassment, preceding his arrival in Besançon, during which the rejected lover had introduced himself into the messaging of Narumi Kurosaki, demanding from her that she deletes the photos of her male friends on her Facebook wall, and obsessorly tracking down The evidence of his new sentimental happiness. His purchases, in a supermarket, of a can of five liters of flammable liquid, a box of matches and detergent, before surprising his ex-girlfriend returning from her dance lesson, in the parking lot student housing. The testimonies of two students who formally recognized Nicolas Zepeda as they had discovered hidden in the kitchen of the residence, two days before the disappearance of Narumi.
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