A key witness reaffirms having heard the main accused who was going to kill Aramburu

The waiter of the Parisian bar who intervened in the fight prior to the murder of the former Argentine rugby player Federico Martín Aramburu On March 19, 2022, he reaffirmed having heard the alleged perpetrator of the fatal shots, the former military man Loïk Le Priol, say that “I was going to kill him” in reference to the athlete.

On the seventh day of the trial at the Paris Criminal Court, Sébastien, a waiter at the Café Mabillon on Boulevard Saint-Germain, provided important testimony that could be decisive in elucidating the intention to kill of the former French Navy commando Le Priol and his friend Romain Bouvier, accused of attempted murder.

Both, who claim to have shot as a way to defend themselves from Aramburu, risk life imprisonment.

“I heard him say: ‘I’m going to kill him.’ I remember that phrase that has stayed in my head, when I found out that it came true, it left me traumatized,” declared Sébastien, questioned by the president of the Court.

“Do you measure the importance of that statement?“, the judge insisted. “Yes,” the waiter responded. Questioned again about who Le Priol was referring to when he said he was going to kill him, Sébastien acknowledged that the accused did not say it explicitly, but that he inferred that it was Aramburu.

The Mabillon employee He insisted that he had not taken the threat literally. from Le Priol because they are phrases that are pronounced hotly after a fight like the one that happened before the tragedy.

Likewise, the president of the Court questioned Sébastien why he did not mention that phrase from Le Priol in his first police deposition – on March 19, 2022, hours after the murder – and did do so in a second deposition, in September 2023.

“I didn’t tell it on the 19th (March 2022) because I was very tired“, he alleged. He assured that he would never have let Le Priol go if he had known that what he said was going to come true.

Sébastien contributed his version of what happened between 5 and 6 a.m. on March 19, 2022. He reported that both Le Priol and Bouvier, whom he saw with a more hostile attitude, were regular customers at Mabillon, while he did not know Aramburu and also former rugby player Shaun Hegarty.

The waiter confirmed the high state of drunkenness of the two former athletes, but clarified that they arrived “in a calm manner and were polite, what they wanted above all was to eat.”

The fight before the shooting, which was triggered by the slaps that Le Priol gave Hegarty – which the waiter said he had not seen – degenerated after Aramburu, defending his friend, dragged the former soldier by the hood and threw him to the ground, whom he described as very nervous and angry.

After that moment, according to Sébastien, the former Argentine international fell out with Le Priol and Bouvier at the same time. The waiter, with the help of security agents, separated the two sides. After the dispute, he confirmed seeing Aramburu and Hegarty leave “a little exhausted, but without special animosity.”

It was later that Bouvier and Le Priol returned and fired 10 bullets in total at Aramburu. Those of the ex-military man were the fatal ones. AND