Lost, wealthy, generous - he was a priceless target; Death of an aristocrat; Factbox

From The Times - 26/05/2007

Adam Sage in Nice
As a direct descendant of political heavyweights, social reformers and writers, expectation was perhaps destined to be a troubling burden for Anthony Ashley-Cooper.

On becoming the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury at the age of 22, he not only inherited the family's 9,000-acre estate in Wimborne, Dorset, but also its proud traditions, defined by the Shaftesbury motto: Live, serve.

Educated at Eton and Oxford and becoming a pilot in the RAF, Lord Shaftesbury seemed destined do justice to both words.

But it was not to be. The latter part of the peer's life became a journey through the dark side of human nature as he fell prey to greed, ambition and an insatiable thirst for drink and women. His indulgence cost him millions, whittling his inheritance down to Pounds 6 million.

The journey ended with his body being dumped in a 20ft ravine beneath a parking bay on the French Riviera, the larynx and thyroid cartilage broken and his rib-cage bearing the trace of heavy blows.

This week, Nice Criminal Court was told that the earl's ceaseless frequentation of bars, escort agencies, hostesses and prostitutes had led him to the woman convicted of organising his murder -his third wife, Jamila M'Barek, 45.
He was, according to his son and heir, Nicholas, a vulnerable, 66-year-old man in manipulative and deceitful hands.

The spiral appears to have started after the death of Lord Shaftesbury's mother in 1999 and his divorce a year later from Christina Casella, the mother of his two children.

He had a short, if well- publicised, relationship with Nathalie Lions, a 29-year-old lingerie model and former Penthouse nude on whom he claimed to have spent Pounds 1 million in gifts.

When that relationship fell apart in 2002, Lord Shaftesbury turned to an old acquaintance, Catherine Gurtler, the owner of an escort agency in Geneva, which provides girls for about Euro 1,500 (Pounds 1,000) a night.
He asked for "Sophie", whom he already knew and liked, but she was not available.

Mrs Gurtler proposed "Sarah", the alias used by another of her "professionals", M'Barek.
The daughter of Tunisian immigrants, M'Barek's upbringing, in the northern French mining town of Lens, could not have been more different from that of her lover.

A childhood marked by poverty and a violent father gave M'Barek a relentless determination to climb the social ladder, which she achieved "by multiplying affairs with men she chose because of their bank accounts and their assets", according to the French investigating magistrate, Catherine Bonnici.

Lord Shaftesbury was a priceless catch -lonely, lost, weak-willed, wealthy and generous. Another of the earl's mistresses told the court: "You don't let someone like that go."

M'Barek moved into Lord Shaftesbury's flat in Versailles.When she told the earl in the autumn of 2002 that she was pregnant, he agreed to marry her and changed his will to bequeath properties and investments worth an estimated Euro 2 million (Pounds 1.3 million).

A child was never born. French prosecutors say that the story of a pregnancy was a lie. M'Barek said that she had had an abortion. The couple drifted apart, although not before Lord Shaftesbury had bought M'Barek a flat worth Euro 648,000 (Pounds 439,000) in Cannes, a town that became his second home.

He would fly over from London, stay at the Euro 700-a-night Noga Hilton Hotel and arrange occasional meetings with his wife, usually when she or her relatives needed money.

But he spent most of his time in what are known locally as American bars, where young female hostesses are paid to encourage male customers to consume drink after drink.

By now, the Earl was increasingly bereft, increasingly drunk and increasingly careless with his credit cards and chequebook, running up debts.

In Cannes, Lord Shaftesbury's favourite haunt had been the Golden Gate bar and its hostesses. He had affairs with at least two of them, then fell for a third, Nadia Orche, whom he promised to marry.

A Moroccan immigrant with little money and three children, Mrs Orche jumped at the chance, finding him a lawyer to begin divorce proceedings from M'Barek. But the woman who signed herself Jamila Shaftesbury was having none of it. A divorce would terminate the will he had drawn up in 2002, ending her dreams of wealth, the court heard.

She resisted, made threatening telephone calls and tried to bully her husband. But Lord Shaftesbury persisted and his lawyerrang her to say the divorce would go through whether she liked it or not.

That telephone call set in train the murder plot, witnesses said. M'Barek invited her brother, Mohammed, from Munich, where he lived, and promised him Euro 150,000 to kill Lord Shaftesbury, according to prosecutors.
On November 5, 2004 -the second anniversary of their wedding -she invited Lord Shaftesbury to her flat, neglecting to mention that her brother was there.

The peer arrived after a morning drinking gin. Three hours later, he was dead - strangled by the powerfully built Mr M'Barek, who carried the body to his BMW convertible and drove it to the ravine in nearby Theoule-sur-Mer.
Two days earlier, an antenna had picked up a signal from Mrs M'Barek's mobile phone at the same spot.

It was here, prosecutors said, that she was checking the final details of a cold-blooded killing designed to get rid of her husband before he could divorce her.

THE FAMILY TREE
* The first Earl of Shaftesbury, above, (1621-1683) founded the Whig party

* The third earl (1671-1713) is remembered as a writer and philosopher and was one of the first to discuss the concept of the "sublime", which formed a key part of 18th century aesthetics

* The seventh earl (1801-1885) helped to outlaw child labour and founded the Ragged Schools Union, which led to compulsory education for all. The statue of Eros in Piccadilly commemorates this earl and its arrow points towards the family seat at Wimborne, Dorset

* The tenth earl's father died in 1947 before he could inherit the family title, but not before he caused a scandal by marrying Sylvia Hawkes, a chorus girl who later married the actor Clark Gable

 (c) 2007 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
Date: 26/05/2007
Publication: The Times