MONTREAL \u2014 The lawyer for one of the men charged in the drive-by shooting of a 15-year-old girl in Montreal has told a jury his client should be found guilty of manslaughter, not murder.<\/p>\n
Marc Labelle said in his closing arguments today at the Montreal courthouse that his client Salim Touaibi admits to firing the shot that killed Meriem Boundaoui and therefore cannot be acquitted.<\/p>\n
But Labelle says the evidence suggests Touaibi didn\u2019t mean to kill anyone when he shot at the Volkswagen Jetta while the teen was in the passenger seat on Feb. 7, 2021.<\/p>\n
Touaibi and his co-defendant, Aymane Bouadi, were charged with first-degree murder after the 15-year-old was killed in Montreal\u2019s St-L\u00e9onard borough by shots fired from a Mercedes that had pulled up beside the Jetta.<\/p>\n
The trial in Superior Court has heard that Boundaoui was caught in the crossfire of a dispute that did not involve her, which arose between two family-owned businesses over parking spots.<\/p>\n
Labelle says his client fired toward the car because he was afraid of being shot and wanted to scare others nearby, but had not realized the teenager was inside.<\/p>\n
Montreal defence lawyer Kwadwo Yeboah, who is not involved in the case, says that the defence\u2019s main objective is to save their client from doing 25 years in jail and suggests that their approach is to argue that Touaibi should be convicted of manslaughter instead of first-degree murder by not denying that he shot the gun that killed Boundaoui, but that there was \u201cno planning\u201d and \u201cno execution of any plan.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a tragic event that happened on that day, a tragic event where a 15-year-old that looks like she was into nothing was killed,\u201d added Yeboah.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, the defence lawyer for Aymane Bouadi, the other accused of first degree murder, will present his final arguments. The crown will then present their final arguments before Monday when the judge will give instructions to the jury before they are sequestered to reach a verdict.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MONTREAL \u2014 The lawyer for one of the men charged in the drive-by shooting of a 15-year-old girl…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":528881,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194292],"tags":[49,48,2338],"class_list":["post-528880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-montreal","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-montreal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/528881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}