Drug trafficking: four young people, including three minors, charged after the attempted murder of a police officer

It took Marseille's judicial police just a month to arrest, on Friday, June 13, the young people responsible for an attempted assassination of a Republican Guard gendarme as he was returning to his parents' home in Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône).

On Saturday, May 10, at 12:50 a.m., seeing two men dressed in black approaching him, one of them armed with a Kalashnikov, the young soldier immediately knelt on the grass. "I have nothing to do with it," he shouted to his attackers, who shot him after hitting him with a rifle butt and kicking him in the head. Managing to get up, the young man fled but, caught and thrown to the ground by a broom, he was hit by a second round of gunfire. Doctors counted 11 injuries. With kidneys and a lung damaged, the young soldier owed his survival only to a lot of luck and his strong physical stamina, Nicolas Bessone, public prosecutor of Marseille, observed at a press conference on Thursday, June 19. He had also "played dead" to stop the shooting and the two attackers then got into a Peugeot Berlingo van driven by an accomplice.

The context of drug gangs is beyond doubt since, initially, the shooters had put to flight the customers of a grocery store in the Encagnane district, a major drug dealing center which the DZ Mafia, a Marseille gang, had taken over after bloody conflicts. During this "coup de force" , the weapon had jammed, preventing the shooting at the store. Directly from their sponsor, the attackers received the injunction to "shoot anyone" and to "act" like a soldier, whom they described as a grocery store customer because he was carrying a white bag. In short, Nicolas Bessone summarizes, the instruction was: "Shoot the first person you see!"

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