Three shootings, three dead, including a 16-year-old teenager: on the night of Sunday to Monday, Marseille, the second city of France, experienced a new bloody episode, once again against a backdrop of turf wars and “dynamics of vendetta between drug dealers.
And this “particularly worrying dynamic (…) will continue in the months to come”, estimated the public prosecutor of Marseille, Dominique Laurens, commenting on “these bloodbaths in our cities, with unfortunately very young people in the first line”.
“This rejuvenation of the victims worries us a lot”, insisted the magistrate: 21 and 23 years old for the two dead in the first shooting, which occurred in the city of Castellas around midnight, in these working-class neighborhoods in the north of Marseille plagued by poverty, the unemployment and drug trafficking; 16 years for the teenager killed half an hour later in the heart of the city, in the port district of Joliette.
Aged 27 on average ten years ago, the victims of the settling of accounts between gangs in Marseille are now four years younger, according to a study carried out on the first nine months of 2022 cited by the prosecutor.
A total of eight people were also injured in these three shootings, including the one towards the city of Aygalades, just minutes after that of Castellas. Among them, a 15-year-old teenager touched at La Joliette was “still in very serious vital prognosis (Monday evening), in really very serious condition”, specified Ms. Laurens.
He and his slain comrade were known to traffic narcotics. The 15-year-old was sentenced on March 31 by a juvenile judge, said the magistrate.
Opened for murder in an organized gang, attempted murder in an organized gang and criminal association, the investigations into these three shootings were entrusted to the judicial police.
A certainty for the prosecutor of Marseille: these new tragedies are the result of “two forces in presence”, of “a double logic”, “a logic of control of the territories, and in particular that of the city of the Paternelle, and a logic of vendetta, of reprisals”.
“This city is today at the origin of almost all the assassinations of recent months in Marseille, with two teams who are fighting over deal points and have undoubtedly entered into a sort of dynamic of vendetta”, explained already Frédérique Camilleri, the police chief of Bouches-du-Rhône, Monday morning at AFP, about the Paternelle.
This is where a 17-year-old boy, known as a “dealer”, was lynched to death in mid-February. There also that, at the end of March, the body of a 20-year-old man, riddled with bullets, had been found, abandoned on a vacant lot.
And the statistics of homicides against the background of drug trafficking continue to accelerate in 2023, notes the Marseille prosecutor, with already 14 dead – 13 shot and the young man lynched at the Paternelle – and 43 injured in barely three months, all in the second city of France.
In 2021 and 2022, within the jurisdiction of the Marseilles court, 25 and 32 deaths were recorded respectively.
“Let them stop killing our children. We feel abandoned. We are waiting for help, for the politicians to try to defuse all this. They are babies (Editor’s note: the victims), something must be done to help them not to fall into these gears, or to get out of them, ”asked Tuesday afternoon Zahia Meziene, spokesperson for the collective of families of victims. from Marseille, to the city of Castellas.
“In Marseille, we are pilots, everything that happens here then happens in other cities. What terrifies me is that this type of behavior is spreading in cities that were not affected at all, like Nantes”, explained Ms. Laurens to AFP recently, fearing “an aggravation of the situation”.
Two men were shot dead on March 28 in Rennes, in what looks like a settling of accounts related to drug trafficking. An extremely rare drama in the Breton capital.