Mystery Surrounds Death of Moroccan Man Hit by Train in Montpellier

The victim died on the spot after being violently hit on Rue Isabelle Ebernaert, between Boulevard Vieussens and Avenue de Maurin, near Rondelet, by a regional express train from Sète to Occitanie, which was entering the SNCF Saint-Roch station in Montpellier. The papers found on him indicate that he was a 54-year-old Montpellier resident with family in Montpellier and Nîmes. At the end of the investigation conducted by the national police, the man would have been the victim of an accident or a suicide, a conclusion that led the Montpellier public prosecutor to close the case on June 27, 2022, recalls Actu.

The victim’s daughter rejects this conclusion of the investigation, as her father was in good health and not depressed enough to commit suicide. The family of the quinquagenarian wonders how and why he ended up alone in a hard-to-access area, on the outskirts of the SNCF Saint-Roch station. To find an answer to this essential question, the family’s lawyers, Bâtonnier Jacques Martin and Guillaume Raymond of the Montpellier bar, have then requested the public prosecutor to reopen the case and conduct a more thorough investigation.

It was then that the investigators discovered that the victim had met his daughter in Nîmes on March 23, 2022, before flying to Fez, Morocco to retrieve his car blocked in the kingdom due to Covid-19. He leaves the kingdom in a hurry, he says, to settle an emergency in France. He books a Fez-Nîmes-Fez round-trip flight, with the outbound flight scheduled for April 8, 2022 and the return on April 11. But he has a medical emergency during the outbound flight, forcing the Ryanair plane to make an emergency landing at Barcelona airport. The emergency services at the airport release him on April 9 and recommend that he undergo an MRI scan upon his return to France.

From Barcelona, how did the quinquagenarian reach Montpellier to end up on this railway line, when his family thought he was in Morocco? Mystery. Was he kidnapped on his return from Spain? Big question mark. The autopsy performed on his body at the Department of Forensic Medicine of the Lapeyronie Hospital reveals the strange presence of ECG-type electrodes on his chest, although no resuscitation was performed in Barcelona or after his death. By requesting a new investigation, the victim’s family wants to elucidate the circumstances of his violent death and determine whether it was really an accident or a suicide.