AT Ciss will learn his fate this Thursday, the day his trial is deliberated. He will learn what the Dakar District Court, before which he was tried last Monday for assault and battery, has in store for him.

The prosecution had requested a three-month prison sentence. In her closing argument, the prosecutor's representative expressed surprise at "the defendant's attitude": "he has developed a cynicism and a casualness [which] reveal [his] nature." "Are you aware that you could have killed him? Behave like a model little brother," she suggested to the accused.

AT Cissé, 24, was tried following a complaint from his cousin Charlemagne Boubacar Diagne, 15 years his senior. According to a report by Les Échos, which attended the trial, the latter accuses the defendant of hitting him in the arm with a broken bottle and smashing his head with a rock. The result: a split neck, 24 stitches, and 18 days of temporary incapacity for work.

The plaintiff claims that his fault was to have refused to lend him 2,000 CFA francs. "He is used to behaving like this. He has no respect for his parents and his elders," Charlemagne Boubacar Diagne insists. "He passed his baccalaureate, but he didn't go to school when he was enrolled in a training institute. We're not refusing him anything. I just want him to get back on the right path, but I'm not asking for anything from him."

AT Cissé, who did not have a lawyer, himself pleaded self-defense. "He threatened me and then hit me. That's why I responded by hitting him with a broken bottle," he said in court.

For the public prosecutor, "only a firm sentence can make him [the defendant] understand the seriousness of the facts" with which he is charged. The final word rests with the judge.