A 28-year-old man was killed and several others were seriously injured overnight from Friday to Saturday, near Paris, during a shooting attributed by authorities to violent turf wars waged by drug traffickers.
The facts occurred on Friday around 11:45 p.m., in the town of Sevran, a town in Seine-Saint-Denis located 25 km northeast of Paris, according to the judicial authorities.
When the police arrived, five injured men were on the ground, according to a police source.
Despite the intervention of the emergency services, one of them, aged 28, hit in the throat and head, died on the spot. The other four, men aged 22 to 29, were evacuated to different hospitals.
According to this same source, the vital prognosis of one of them was in jeopardy: aged 24, the young man was hit by two bullets in the chest.
During the night, three other gunshot wounds were hospitalized at the Aulnay-sous-Bois hospital center, a town neighboring Sevran, one of which left immediately.
According to initial information, two men arrived in a parking lot in a car. The passenger got out of the vehicle then fired several times before fleeing, the police source said.
From the same source, 25 7.62 cartridge cases, a caliber used in particular for Kalashnikov-type weapons, were found on the ground.
No arrests had taken place at midday on Saturday.
Several units of mobile forces were deployed in the area on Saturday to reinforce a system already comprising local police officers and anti-crime brigades, the police headquarters told AFP.
An investigation was opened for intentional homicide by an organized gang and attempted intentional homicide by an organized gang and entrusted to the criminal brigade of the Paris judicial police, the prosecutor’s office told AFP.
The mayor of Sevran, Stéphane Blanchet, said the shooting took place in a parking lot near a cultural center. “We are not going to hide our faces: it is necessarily a settling of scores linked to drug trafficking,” reacted the elected official, contacted by telephone by AFP.
“There is a need to bring order and intervene deeply to eradicate trafficking,” he added, deploring that “the idiots who fire live ammunition do not listen to calls for calm.”
After Marseille, Sevran was the subject of an anti-drug operation “XXL square” on March 25 with the aim of putting a stop to trafficking.