HE IS one of the biggest stars of north African pop, a heartthrob whose sell-out worldwide gigs and duets with Sting brought Algerian rai music to a new international audience.
But Cheb Mami’s career came crashing down after accusations of a gruesome crime against his French ex-girlfriend saw him imprisoned, then jump bail and live as a recluse for two years.
He went on trial in Paris yesterday accused of conspiring to have his former lover drugged, kidnapped and subjected to a forced backstreet abortion.
If found guilty, he faces up to 10 years in prison and a €150,000 fine.
Mami (42), known as the Prince of Rai, was arrested at a Paris airport on Monday after he voluntarily flew into France for the trial, ending two years on the run from the law.
He had skipped French bail in 2007 and fled to his home region in southwest Algeria. He appeared in court yesterday alongside his agent, Michel Le Corre, and two other men will also be tried.
Le Corre is accused of having lured the woman to Algiers under the pretext of a business trip.
Mami, a one-time factory apprentice who shot to fame as a teenager in the 1980s after coming second in an Algerian TV singing contest, is accused of complicity in the brutal kidnap and botched abortion attempt against his former partner, a French photo-journalist.
The 43-year-old woman, known as Camille to protect her real identity, is a photographer specialising in rai music. She began a relationship with Mami in 2004 when the star was at the height of his global fame and had been decorated by Jacques Chirac for “making rai known across the world”.
In Camille’s only media interview, with the daily Le Parisien earlier this year, she said Mami, whose real name is Mohammed Khalifati, told her during their relationship: “If you get pregnant, you have an abortion.”
She told him that was out of the question. In July 2005, she informed him by phone that she was pregnant.
“He went mad,” she said.
A month later, a person connected with Mami’s entourage called to invite her for a four-day trip to cover rai in Algiers. Camille said she was met at the city airport by people close to Mami’s entourage who accompanied her to a rented house where she was given an orange juice that had apparently been laced with a sedative.
After 15 minutes she could barely move, she said.
She was then taken by car to another villa where she was thrown on to a bed in a small room, insulted and shaken by one of the men.
“Two women arrived. They gave me three injections, no doubt to bring on contractions. One straddled me and pressed my stomach,” Camille was quoted as saying.
She assumed she had lost the baby, but when she returned to France, doctors found the foetus was still alive, and she later gave birth to a girl, now three.
“I want my daughter to know that she’s a baby born of love,” Camille told the paper. “Not on her father’s part, no doubt, but for me, that’s the case.
Mami denies being present in Algeria at the time of the events, or any involvement in them, but Camille has given investigators a recording of a phone conversation allegedly showing he was present.
He told the French paper Liberationin 2007 that the relationship was not serious and he did not want an illegitimate child.
He told the Algerian press that he had taken bad advice from people around him and was the victim of a conspiracy against him by western media because he was such a big Arab star.
In June 2007, after fleeing France, he said he had lost trust in the French judicial system. "I haven't fled justice, I've fled injustice," he told the Algerian Quotidien d'Oran. – (Guardian Service)