Global InformationOmar Raddad Affair information
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The Omar Raddad Affair was a highly publicised criminal trial in Mougins, France. After the murder of wealthy widow Ghislaine Marchal in 1991, her gardener Omar Raddad, an illiterate Moroccan immigrant, was arrested. Raddad was convicted in 1994 and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He has maintained his innocence, and received a partial pardon from French President Jacques Chirac in 1996 at the request of Moroccan King Hassan II, which reduced his sentence to four years and eight months. He was released from prison in 1998, and in 2021 received permission to reopen the case after the discovery of new DNA evidence.
The misspelled sentence "Omar m'a tuer" ("Omar killed me"), found written in blood at the crime scene, became a widely used phrase in French society during the 1990s. The last word of the sentence is not properly conjugated; it should read: "Omar m'a tuée". Skeptics contended that this is an odd mistake for a native French speaker to make. The case was the subject of the 2011 film Omar m'a tuer by Roschdy Zem.