In an austere and moving tribute, in the middle of a fine rain, Paris honored the former Argentine rugby international Federico Martin Aramburuwhose murder on Boulevard Saint-Germain at the hands of a far-right militant turns one year old today.
A few meters from the crime, at 146 of the legendary boulevard, family, friends and former colleagues of Aramburu came to remember the first anniversary of the shooting murder by Loïk Le Priol (28 years old), the alleged perpetrator of the crime provisionally detained for a year awaiting trial.
“I feel the pain for the lack of Fede and the trauma. My son was killed in the back”declared to the press Cecilia Aramburu, who led the tribute to the former player of the Argentine San Isidro, Biarritz Olympique and USAP Perpignan, assassinated when he was 42 years old and the father of three children.
In addition to the mother of the former Argentine international (22 caps for the Pumas), the Argentine Ambassador to France, Leonardo Costantino, and local authorities, including the Paris Sports Councilor and former rugby player, Pierre Rabadan, intervened at the event. .
The tribute, in which the widow of Aramburu was also present, ended with the reproduction of “Give joy to my heart”, a song by the Argentine singer Fito Páez.
In his official speech, which he had to interrupt due to emotion, Cecilia Aramburu pointed the finger at the intolerant ideology of the extreme right as the main reason for the murder of her son and regretted that both Le Priol and one of his accomplices, Romain Bouvier, acted with “total” freedom despite being on file with the police and one of them serving probation.
“My son was the victim of an execution that never should have taken place,” found.
For the Argentine Ambassador Costantino, Aramburu, who since his retirement from rugby managed a tourist company in Biarritz, symbolized the friendship between Argentina and France and asked that “justice be done.”
Assassination of Federico Aramburu
In the early hours of March 18-19, Aramburu, accompanied by his friend and former New Zealand player Shaun Hegarty, got into an argument at the Mabuillon restaurant with Le Priol, who was accompanied by his partner, and Bouvier.
Aramburu and Hegarty would have come to the defense of a third person who had asked for a cigarette and who had been badly treated by the two young extremists.
After xenophobic and racist comments by Le Priol and Bouvier -as denounced by those around Aramburu-, the tension increased and the argentinianwho also had French nationality, was shots of both, although the fatalities were by Le Priol, a member of far-right movements and a former military man.
One of the two plaques discovered on the boulevard Saint-Germain denounce the ideological character of the murder: “Let no family ever again suffer the loss of a loved one due to ideas and hatred that are rooted in fanaticism like that of the extreme right”.
