October 23, 2006

To the tenants of his bucolic 9,000 acres Dorset estate, he was a model lord, fascinated by bats and barn owls; a nature-loving activist who planted a million trees. So how did the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury end up at the bottom of a rubbish ravine in the French Riviera – with his wife and brother-in-law as the prime suspects? Alex Duval Smith investigates

Just l0 kilometres west of the floodlit palm trees of Cannes, the vallon de la Rague seems like a sample of nature the concrete mixers miraculously overlooked. Above a bay hosting a luxury yacht marina, the hidden gully carves through jagged red rocks to deliver a small stream to the turquoise Mediterranean. It was this chaotic landscape that enchanted the English aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries. It inspired them to swap the mists of home for winter warmth on the French Riviera. They brought with them their foibles, installed their own vicars, and created the Promenade des Anglais in Nice and built splendid homes with names like Cumberland, Scott and Villa Victoria.

Today the old world grandeur has been replaced by ephemeral glitz, the old money by new. Even the vallon de la Rague, owned by a Pascoal mining company and frequented mainly by Sunday joggers is not what it was. Around the stream in the gully, the lumpy soil is webbed with ivy. Kick at it and you discover that this haven of nature is really nothing more than a fly-tipper’s dump, littered with the rubble of Riviera opulence: a broken bucket of pool disinfectant, a set of discarded plastic window shutters, a scattering of cracked terracotta roof tiles and a builder’s cap. This is where, under a laurel tree on April 5 last year, police found the skeletal remains of 66-year-old Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury. He had been missing for five months.

The murder of the wealthy lord on November 5, 2004 is almost solved and a trial is expected in Nice next year. Two suspects, Lord Shaftesbury’s estranged third wife, Jamila, and her younger brother, Mohamed M’Barek, are in custody in Nice and Grasse, under formal investigation. Last month, investigating magistrate Catherine Bonicci staged a reconstruction of the crime to help ascertain whether the killing, which Mohamed admits, was premeditated. Defence lawyers claim Jamila, 44, was merely the witness to a drunken row in her flat, in which Mohamed, 42, inadvertently strangled Lord Shaftesbury to death. The lawyer for the Ashley Cooper family believes Jamila and her brother planned the murder and that their motive was money.

”For the one-day reconstruction, Mohamed was transported in leg chains to the vallon de la Rague. There, he demonstrated that he had enough strength to have acted alone; he managed to lift a 13st dummy — the same weight as the Earl’s body — out of the boot of a car and dump it down a ravine. Jamila claims she was not with her brother when he disposed of the body and that she had no role in the killing other than, under duress, to help her brother load the body into his black BMW. “I did not want him to die. I just wanted my brother to intimidate him,” she has told investigators.

Beyond its legal aspects, the case offers a glimpse of lives gone wrong in a value-system determined by lies and Lamborghinis. It is an upstairs-downstairs story in which everyone seems emotionally damaged. Depending on whom you believe, Jamila, a Moroccan miner’s daughter, was a bar hostess and social climber who took advantage of a naive aristocrat with more money than sense. To others, she was a generous, self-made woman at the mercy of an alcoholic philanderer on Viagra who believed he could buy himself out of any situation. Despite their age and class gap, Jamila and Anthony had certain things in common: a dual persona being one.

The thousand kilometres separating the money-buys-all Riviera from the splendidly dilapidated family estate at Wimborne St Giles might as well be a million miles. On the Shaftesburys’ 9,000 acres of Dorset, spanning four villages and including a vast 17th family home, memories of the lord are entirely in line with his lineage.

The first Earl (1621-1683) founded the Whig party. The seventh Earl (1801-1885) helped outlaw child labour, and his Ragged Schools Union led directly to the introduction of compulsory education for all. The statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus commemorates the Victorian Earl and its arrow points towards St Giles. The complex love life of the 10th Earl is of no concern to the Dorset locals, most of whom apparently didn’t even know he had a third wife. Others, imbued with loyalty to a family whose motto is ‘Love, Serve’, felt the lord’s extravagant private affairs were ‘his business’, especially since he had the good manners to conduct them out of their sight.

It seems that a vain search for love was also at the centre of Jamila’s personality. According to psychologists’ reports, she rarely saw her two children, Ralf and Kiara, 14 and 12. They live on the Riviera with their grandmother — the mother of the millionaire Dutch businessman who was her first husband. Jamila equates money with love, claim some psychologists, and she lavishes it on her family and others close to her.

One of seven children, Jamila was born in Lens, northern France, of a Tunisian mother and Moroccan father. Hers was a family of modest means and, it seems, home life was rough. Mohamed and Jamila have told police that their father was an alcoholic who beat them and their mother. When the parents separated in 1967, the seven children returned with their mother to Nabeul, Tunisia, where Mohamed and Jamila spent their childhood and teens.

When adulthood came, the M’Barek brood took on the world with gusto. Today, two of the M’Barek daughters live in Switzerland. Mohamed’s most recent home without bars was a flat in a suburb of Munich. Jamila lived in an apartment in a converted Normandy-style villa in Californie, a Cannes neighbourhood of high walls and surveillance cameras. It had been bought for her by Lord Shaftesbury and is said to be worth 700,000 pounds. The youngest daughter in the family, Fatima, works as a translator at the French embassy in Tunis.

On the phone from the Tunisian capital, Fatima denies her sister is a former hostess. Jamila is a trained beautician and she worked in hairdressing in Paris, insists Fatima. “She also had a job in gourmet cuisine, with the chef Alain Ducasse, in Monaco. Since her marriage to the Dutchman — the father of her two children — she has not needed to work,” says Fatima, “she did not need money.”

Like many aspects of this killing, the story of how Jamila met Lord Shaftesbury varies according to whom you speak. Lady Frances, Lord Shaftesbury’s 65-year-old sister says they had known each other for less than a year when they married on November 5, 2002 at Hilversum in the Netherlands. He had pulled the plug on their first plans for a wedding in spring 2002 ‘because he felt something was not right’. She says that at the time of the marriage, Lord Shaftesbury was ‘in a bad period of depression’ and especially vulnerable. “In August 1999 our mother had died of cancer in tragic circumstances while we were all enjoying ourselves at my eldest son’s wedding. For my brother, her death was a catastrophe. He adored her. She had been his protector and greatest admirer since the death of our father in 1947, when Anthony was eight and I was six.”

The death from heart disease at the age of 47 of Frances’s and Anthony’s father had prompted their mother, Francoise Soulier, to move back to her native France with her children. She remarried and settled in Paris. The children spent their next few years shuttling across the Channel to their boarding schools, Eton for him and Heathfield for his sister. Holidays were spent in France and with their grandparents at St Giles.

”I was an easy child with a natural equilibrium,” says Lady Frances. “I had no responsibilities and there were no expectations of me. My brother suffered a great deal from being uprooted, first by the war, then by his father’s death. He needed to be prepared to become the next Earl of Shaftesbury, yet it was difficult for our French stepfather to have authority over him. Our grandfather, the ninth Earl of Shaftesbury, was very kind, very English, but he was already an old man.”

Lord Shaftesbury was 22 when he succeeded to the earldom after his grandfather’s death in 1961. In 1966 he married Bianca de Paolis, an Italian woman he had met on a skiing holiday and with whom he remained for 10 years. His second wife, Christina Casella Montan, the mother of his two sons, Anthony and Nicholas, was Swedish. They were married from 1976 until 2000, when she became the first victim of the death of Lord Shaftesbury’s mother.

”When our mother died,” says Lady Frances, “it was as though my brother had become an orphan at the age of 61. Without her, he felt emotionally bereft. He lost his grip on reality.” In 2000, Lord Shaftesbury abruptly moved out of the Wimborne family home, Mainsail Haul (the dowager cottage on the estate, deliberately misspelt by his grandfather), and moved to a bachelor existence in Hove. He left Lady Christina in charge and, as though sensing that he was in decline, passed the running of the earldom to Anthony, then 23.

Jamila had recently separated from her Dutch husband when she met Lord Shaftesbury in late 2001. Lady Frances believes her brother was impressed with her as a wealthy divorcee, at a time when he was very needy. “He was desperate for company,” says Lady Frances. “He had bought a flat in Versailles, and had entirely recreated two rooms from our late mother’s house. He had used all the furniture, books and knick knocks of our childhood in Paris. It was a bit...” she winces.

Lady Frances believes Jamila came along at the right moment to take advantage of the emotional wreck that Lord Shaftesbury had become. “She was feminine, attractive and attentive. She cooked nice meals for him. She was experienced with men and made him feel important. She was obsessed with money, possessive. Once they got together I did not see much of him. She was the wrong person for him.”

In the eyes of Fatima, it was Lord Shaftesbury who was the wrong person for her sister. “He was very moody. You never knew where you were with him. He was sickly and had incontinence trouble. My sister had to change the sheets all the time. She had to look after him like a baby. He was an alcoholic and he was always taking Viagra. He was unfaithful from the start. He made my sister very miserable. When we had the wedding party in Holland, he walked, naked, into the room of my other sister, Wassilia, and got into her bed. When he visited us in Tunisia once, he tried to fondle my breasts.”

Jamila and Lord Shaftesbury separated in April 2004 and divorce proceedings were set in motion. By that time, he had given her a windmill in the Gers region of southwestern France, the 700,000 pound duplex in a villa in Cannes (with staff), a 4x4 car, and a monthly allowance which is put at between 7,500 and 10,000 pounds, depending on which lawyer you speak to.

Lady Frances maintains that ‘when my brother said he would divorce her, she would not accept’. She claims that before the separation, Jamila convinced Lord Shaftesbury to sell the Versailles flat. Lady Frances claims, “She and Mohamed arranged to empty the flat and when my brother asked where his mother’s furniture had got to, she said it was on a boat to Tunisia where it was going to be sold. My brother was distraught. This was cruel emotional blackmail. In fact, the furniture was in storage in Cannes, but my brother never knew that. I have just managed to get hold of the key.”

Fatima sees the divorce differently. “Jamila could not bear the lord any longer. She loved him but he was so unfaithful all the time. Mohamed tried unsuccessfully to reconcile them.” During Jamila’s relationship with Lord Shaftesbury, her younger brother, who lived alone in a flat at Fahrenzhausen, Munich, was never far away. A twice worker in a cosmetics factory, Mohamed is described both as impulsive — capable of driving to the Cote d’Azur on a whim to visit his sister — and as the pillar among seven siblings.

Anis Selah, a childhood friend from Nabeul, describes Mohamed as ‘gentle, kind and totally unmaterialistic’. He says Mohamed was “a sporty type, very good at football. He was even invited for trials at [Tunisian club] Esperance Sportive. The women he married — first a German he met in Tunisia, then another German who is the mother of his three children — was very possessive of him.” Fatima talks of her brother as God fearing and generous.

Mohamed’s lawyer, Melanie Junginger, holds up an A4 sheet covered with rubber stamps from the remand centre at Grasse: “He does not have many visitors, except me. He is extremely popular at the prison, a devout man who is calm and says he deserves ill because he has done ill. He speaks well of Jamila and claims he should have controlled himself. Jamila, on the other hand, says he is a violent man who frequently asked her for money.”

Last September, five months after Lord Shaftesbury’s decaying skeleton was found by French police in the vallon de la Rague, Mohamed confessed. “I am sorry. May God bless my brother-in-law,” he told investigating magistrate Catherine Bonicci. Mohamed said that on November 5, 2004 at about 11:45am, after driving all night from Munich in his convertible BMW, he woke up at the flat in Californie to find Jamila and Lord Shaftesbury having a row. He had a drink. Lord Shaftesbury was already drunk.

”It was an accident. My sister has nothing to do with it. He was aggressive. I had just woken up. I was in my underpants. He grabbed my throat. I got him on to his back. When I let go of his throat it was too late.” He confessed to carrying Lord Shaftesbury’s dead body, alone, to his black BMW, and dumping the corpse in the vallon de la Rague.

Some reports have hinted there may have been premeditation and this will be a key issue at trial. On the eve of the killing — which happened on the second anniversary of Jamila’s marriage to Lord Shaftesbury — Mohamed had flown to Munich from Cannes after a short visit to his sister. He claims he collected his car and drove through the night back to Cannes because he had several bags of children’s clothes to take back to Bavaria, and because a Lebanese businessman on the Riviera had shown an interest in buying the vehicle.

Police have found no bank evidence that Jamila paid Mohamed to kill Lord Shaftesbury, but investigators who taped a prison visit to Jamila by her Swiss sister, Naima, claim that a figure of 150,000 pound was mentioned. It will not be known until the court case whether the phrases used by Naima and Jamila during the prison conversation did indicate any premeditation.

A few weeks before the confession, Mohamed received a visit from Fatima during which, Junginger believes, she convinced her brother to take full responsibility for the murder because their 70-year-old mother, Rihani, is in fragile health in Nabeul. “I believe the family has decided that it’s better to have one sibling in jail than two,” says Junginger. “They believe that if Mohamed takes the full blame, Jamila will walk free.” It may come as no surprise that his lawyer should take this view, but so far there is no firm evidence in support of this claim.

Indeed, Jamila’s lawyer, Franck de Vita, expects her to be released soon: Jamila had no motive to kill the lord. When her brother started fighting with the lord, she screamed. She tried to stop the fight. If she had had anything to gain from the lord’s killing, she would have skipped the country. She had ample time to do so between November 2004 and her arrest in February last year. She was receiving 10,000 pound a month and she was looking forward to getting 400,000 pound out of the divorce.

There is one more thing: another woman. Lord Shaftesbury had reportedly met a new love, 33-year-old Nadia Orcha, for whom he had bought a flat in nearby Vence. Nadia spoke to the local paper, Nicein January 2005. She claimed to have seen Lord Shaftesbury when he arrived in the south of France on November 3, 2004, and to have told him she was pregnant. He said he would marry her, she told the newspaper, but after he spent the night of November 4 drinking at the Barracuda Club, “I told him [on the phone] that if he continued like that I would not stay with him and would have an abortion.” There has been no finding about whether or not these allegations are true.

Turn out of the Rue de Latour, where the Barracuda is situated, and the white marble Hilton — where Lord Shaftesbury stayed on the night before he was killed — is a short walk away.

In the vallon de la Rague, vegetation has laid a final blanket over the spot where Lord Shaftesbury’s skeleton was found, with his boots and a scrap of his jeans. His neck was fractured, as was an ankle. Police say wild animals in the gully had done such a voracious job that it is impossible to know what condition the body was in when it was dumped. Lord Shaftesbury eventually got a proper burial, on September 30 last year, in the family tomb at Wimborne St Giles parish church. He was laid to rest alongside Anthony, his eldest son, who died in May last year, a month after the discovery of his father’s skeleton. Anthony was 27 and died of a heart attack in New York while visiting Nicholas, his younger brother.

Lady Frances is concerned for 26old Nicholas, a DJ who is now unexpectedly the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury and for whom one of the first tasks will be to manage double death duties. Like Lady Frances, Nicholas was born free, with a title but no money or inherited responsibility. — Dawn/Guardian Service

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