six defendants sentenced to up to 25 years in prison for abuse of drug trafficking workers

They worked for a Marseille drug network. Six defendants were sentenced, Friday, September 29, to sentences ranging from seven to twenty-five years of criminal imprisonment by the juvenile court in Marseille. They were being prosecuted for having, in 2020, kidnapped and tortured two little hands in trafficking, raping one of them.

Wishing to earn money, a 15-year-old local schoolboy and a 16-year-old teenager from the Paris region, recruited by traffickers from the city of Busserine, in the northern districts of Marseille, had been detained, cut off of their loved ones and forced to work for free.

During their confinement in the city, four days for one, almost a month for the other, they had been regularly beaten, burned, strangled until they fainted. One of the two teenage victims, hospitalized in the Paris region in an anemic state, was covered in scars and burn marks.

Three defendants who were minors at the time of the facts

Considered one of the main actors in the events, the man who acted as field manager for the network, a boy aged 18 at the time of the events, received the heaviest sentence, twenty-five years in prison.

Among the accused, three were aged 17 at the time of the facts. Despite the heavy sentences handed down, the court gave them the benefit of the minority excuse, which halves the maximum sentence incurred. One of them was sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment, the Assize Court having also sentenced him for the rape of one of the victims. The young accused admitted to having imposed fellatio in a cellar in the city, which he had filmed, then threatening to broadcast it on social networks. Two other defendants were sentenced to fifteen and seven years in prison.