Seven young people, including six minors, were presented to an examining magistrate on Thursday evening in Dijon, at the end of their police custody. They are suspected of having participated in a series of assaults last week as part of inter-neighborhood rivalry. They could be prosecuted in particular for intentional violence but also, for some, for having filmed the blows and broadcast the images, what is called Happy Slapping.
It is difficult to be categorical about the origin of this violence between young people from La Fontaine-d’Ouche and Chenôve, but during a press briefing, the Dijon public prosecutor, Olivier Caracotch, mentioned “a video mocking a relative of one of the people involved“Several of the facts were already known, including the stabbing of a 16-year-old boy in front of Lycée Hyppolite Fontaine on Tuesday February 1 and the stabbing of two young people on a bus the next day.
Six acts of violence, linked together
In total, these are six acts of violence, spread over four days, which were recorded : a young man whose beating in Chenôve was filmed and posted on social networks, but also a second attack in a bus of two victims, and an attempt, in a restaurant, where this time the attackers were put in leak.
“It was important to provide, first by the police and then by the courts, an immediate response to these behaviors which we saw were extremely repetitive, extremely dangerous and with a logic of escalation that had to be stopped as soon as possible”, also underlines the public prosecutor. Since the first facts, about fifteen investigators from the departmental security have been engaged on these facts.
Victims who are sometimes aggressors
The investigations made it possible to highlight the links between these attacks, thanks to the exploitation of the social networks and the mobile phones of the defendants, sometimes themselves victims of certain facts. One and the same judicial investigation was opened.
The suspects, for the most part, deny or minimize their involvement in the violence. The prosecution requested a placement under judicial supervision, “with the obligation to respect a curfew and obligations of distancing, either distancing from the conurbation, in the broad sense of the term, or prohibitions, for people from Chenôve to frequent the district of La Fontaine- d’Ouche, and for people from the Fontaine d’Ouche, to frequent the district of Chenôve”explains Olivier Caracotch.