A COURT in Nice sentenced Omar Raddad, a Moroccan gardener, to 18 years' imprisonment yesterday for the murder of Ghislaine Marchal, a wealthy widow who apparently wrote 'Omar killed me' in her own blood as she bled to death.

Raddad, 31, who speaks little French despite having lived in the south of France for eight years, consistently denied stabbing Mrs Marchal, 65, the widow of the owner of the Marchal car components company. The victim was found barricaded in the utility room of her villa in Mougins, an exclusive village on the outskirts of Cannes, where she died on 23 June 1991.

On the wall was written 'Omar m'a tuer', a grammatically incorrect sentence, since the participle for 'killed' should have been 'tuee'. The error for a while prompted investigators to believe that the erudite Mrs Marchal could not have been its author.

But the fact that the door was blocked from the inside with an iron bar and furniture piled against it in a room from which there was no other exit led them to conclude that Mrs Marchal, with stab- wounds to the stomach and arms, had taken refuge there from her attacker and made the mistake as she was enfeebled by the loss of blood.

The motive, according to the accusation, was money. Raddad was painted by the prosecution as a prostitute-frequenting gambler, while his family described him as gentle and discreet.

After Mrs Marchal's corpse was found, Raddad, who had made no attempt to hide himself, was arrested two days after the killing at the home of his parents-in-law in Toulon. Throughout the trial, he appeared calm and composed.

For most of the eight-day court hearing, Raddad spoke in Arabic through an interpreter. Yesterday, however, he said in French that Mrs Marchal was 'like a mother. She did me a lot of good. I did not kill her.'

The case took on a good deal of social significance, which was reflected in the choice of Raddad's main lawyer, Jacques Verges. Mr Verges, who first made a name for himself defending Algerian rebels during the North African colony's 1954-62 war of independence, has a reputation for taking on cases that embarrass the establishment. The most famous was his defence of Klaus Barbie, a Nazi police officer in Lyons during the Second World War who was condemned to life imprisonment in 1987 for crimes against humanity.

After the verdict on Raddad was announced yesterday, the controversial aspects of the case were highlighted by a demonstration by Moroccans in front of the courthouse, protesting against what they attacked as a racist judgment.