“Nothing in my life is comparable to what they are,” explains the former mayor tried with 18 other defendants

At the helm, Mélanie Boulanger showed her distance from the Meziani clan, implicated in large-scale drug trafficking in this town near Rouen.

The former mayor of the town of Canteleu (Seine-Maritime) was heard on Wednesday June 19 by the Bobigny criminal court. Mélanie Boulanger appears with one of her deputies for complicity in a large-scale drug trafficking case. Both are accused of having helped the traffickers, alongside whom they appear. On the stand, the former mayor proclaimed her innocence.

“I am very far from the other defendantsshe insists. Nothing in my life compares to what they are.” In fact, the former elected official, with blond hair cut in a bob, well-dressed, carries a well-rehearsed rhetoric. In the courtroom, she clashes with the traffickers she is accused of helping.

However, it is his links with them which are studied by the court, and particularly his links with the Meziani family. This clan is known to be at the origin of vast drug trafficking and to terrorize this town of 14,000 inhabitants. “But I’m innocentassures Mélanie Boulanger. For 32 months, a false portrait has been painted of me, my city. I am destroyed”sobs the elected official in a visibly well-prepared tirade.

In court, the mayor of Canteleu above all explained her loneliness in the face of trafficking which is plaguing her town and to this family who threatened her. She recounts an exchange with a member of the prefecture to whom she explains her distress in the face of very heavy traffic. “He answered me, full of testosterone, that when you were a woman and you were afraid, you did not become mayor of Canteleusays the chosen one. I swore to myself that I would prove him wrong.”. So, Mélanie Boulanger alerts everyone, she says: the police, the prefecture, the ministry… And all the way to the Élysée. “But I was told that Canteleu was not Marseille nor Seine-Saint-Denis”explains the former mayor.

She also describes her loneliness in the face of threats of which she says she is a victim from the Mezianis. She recounts, on the stand, this time when a member of her siblings came to ask her for social housing. When she refused, he told her he knew her address and her daughter’s school. “Why didn’t you file a complaint? ?”asks the president. “I asked for my daughter to be protected. I was told to trust the justice system. But when you want to attack the apple of your eye, it’s difficult and I am stayed there”explains Mélanie Boulanger.

The former mayor also assures that she never gave in to threats and even claims to have given the name of the Mezianis to everyone: police, prefecture, justice. But “seeing that the situation is not being taken seriously, I tell myself that I have to let them know that things are going to get messy”explains Mélanie Boulanger.

It is for this reason, she says, that she uses her deputy and lover Hasbi Kolak, in charge of commerce at the town hall but above all close to the Mezianis, whom he has known since childhood. “Hasbi, he’s a chatterbox, I know he talks, so I tell him that there are going to be patrols, major investigations underway”explains the elected official. “Bluff”, his deputy explained yesterday at the bar. On the contrary, the accusation considers complicity, which adds that the information provided by the mayor and her deputy helped the Mezianis to make their trafficking prosper.