The suspect in the murder of Narumi Kurosaki, his ex-girlfriend, is on trial before the Vesoul Court of Appeal.
This Tuesday, December 19 marks the eleventh day of interrogation in the trial of Nicolas Zepeda, a 33-year-old Chilean. He is appearing in court for the second time after a first sentence of 28 years in prison during his trial at first instance in 2022. He is accused of the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Narumi Kurosaki, a 21-year-old Japanese student. The young woman was killed on the night of December 4 to 5, 2016, in Besançon. The accused was 26 years old at the time.
Since December 4 and until December 22, Nicolas Zepeda appears before the Vesoul Court of Appeal in Haute-Saône, where he continues to deny the accusations made against him, as during his first trial. This Monday, December 18, he said he was ready to respond to “this horrible accusation for something he did not do”, as relayed The world.
However, this second trial is marked by the confused and sometimes contradictory statements of the accused. This Tuesday, December 19 in the morning during the opening of the hearing, Sylvie Galley, the lawyer for the victim’s family, questioned him about his purchases of matches and a can of gasoline near Dijon in November 2016. The accused had just arrived in France from Chile in order to surprise his girlfriend. According to him, it was an “impulse purchase”. And to add that “sometimes (he) makes stupid purchases”, as reported by AFP. That November night, the accused then went to the forest in the Dole sector. For what ? The young man assures that he was looking for his route and where he would have seen “villages, with Christmas lights” and would therefore have decided to linger there. For investigators, it is possible that this wooded area is the place where Nicolas Zepeda left the victim’s body, which was never found.
When the accused was questioned about the facts of the night of the tragedy, one of the lawyers for the civil parties, Randall Schwerdorffer, told journalists on Monday that the version he gave is “diametrically opposed to that which ‘he had given in the first instance’. Nicolas Zepeda claimed that he and his girlfriend had a protected intimate relationship at night but no trace of a condom was found in the student’s room. For the lawyer these are “phenomenal lies”. Renaud Portejoie, the accused’s lawyer, himself admitted that his client’s answers were sometimes confused, specifying that he “sinks in a certain way”, as indicated in the South-West.
This Tuesday, December 19, Mr. Schwerdorffer asked the accused why the latter was not worried when he learned of Narumi’s disappearance on December 6 when he returned to Chile. Indeed, Nicolas Zepeda claims to have telephoned the young woman from Chile. France 3 shared this Tuesday morning the lawyer’s statements: “The call to Narumi from Chile does not exist sir. Under the control of Mr. President, the victim’s phone never indicated your call” . To which the accused replied: “That is incorrect”. The trial is scheduled to conclude this Friday, December 22.