The police commander who killed, Wednesday in Nice (Alpes-Maritimes), a man in his twenties during an arrest, was referred Friday January 21 “with a view to the opening of a judicial investigation on the count of manslaughter”, announced the Nice prosecutor’s office. “The prosecution will require the police officer to be placed under strict judicial control”, he added.
“The investigations carried out, in particular the video exploitations of the scene of the facts, the hearings of witnesses, the collection of technical data on the weapon used, do not allow to date to contradict the accidental thesis put forward by the respondent “, said the Nice prosecutor’s office.
The police officer, member of the Research and Intervention Brigade (BRI) of the Nice judicial police, had been placed in police custody for intentional homicide within the framework of an investigation of flagrance entrusted to the General Inspectorate of the national police (IGPN) of Nice.
He “claims to have had no intention of making an attempt on the life of the victim and reports, during his hearings, of an accidental shooting linked to the circumstances of the arrest”, according to the press release.
On Wednesday, a series of arrests had been organized in the Nice district of Las Planas, a city located in the north of the city, where had been killed, on the night of December 24 to 25, a young man of 24 years, Ermelindo Goncalves Fontes, with a bullet to the chest. A judicial investigation had been opened for assassination in an organized gang.
During one of these arrests, rue de la Buffa in Nice, some 500 meters from the Promenade des Anglais, the police officer, described by the Nice prosecutor, Xavier Bonhomme, as a commander “experimented”, at “used his weapon and hit the head of one of the individuals then targeted by the police operation”, underlined the prosecution.
The victim, born in 1999 and originally from Marseille, was hit by the shot “at the level of the back of the lower lobe of the right ear” and died “as a result of his injuries” while she was being taken care of by the emergency services, he continued.