The musician returns to this drama of 1973, when his brother Ahmed was mistaken for a Palestinian terrorist.
Chico Bouchikhi, former member of the Gipsy Kings, returns this Tuesday in the columns of Parisian on a family drama: the murder of his brother Ahmed in 1973, mistakenly targeted by the Mossad.
“We were touched in our flesh, my parents died of grief,” says the 68-year-old musician, who was 18 at the time of the events.
The daily summarizes the case: that summer, the Israeli intelligence services are looking for Ali Hassan Salameh, of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September who killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. They think the found in Norway, in the town of Lillehammer. But it is Ahmed Bouchikhi, eldest of seven siblings, whom they kill in front of his Norwegian wife.
“He was killed at 30, in front of her, on her way home from the cinema. She was pregnant,” says Chico Bouchikhi.
Committed to peace
“I forgave,” he says. “I was raised in love, benevolence. I preferred to talk about music. There is a time for everything. Who would have understood that my brother had been the victim of an error by the Mossad? What impact could that have had? have on the group?”.
This forgiveness was confirmed in 1994, when he sang in Norway for the first anniversary of the Oslo Accords, in front of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “I had chills. It was an unforgettable moment,” he recalls to the daily.
He later became special envoy of Unesco and committed to peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. François Hollande awarded him the Legion of Honor in 2016:
“Chico was very marked by the assassination of his brother, which is why he wanted to mobilize for peace in the Middle East” he confided to “Release” in 2019. “I decorated him for this commitment, but also for his music of joy.”
After leaving the Gipsy Kings in 1991, Chico Bouchikhi founded his own group, Chico and the Gypsies, which is still active today. He organizes dinner shows in his estate in Arles, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, as reported The Parisian.
