Three shootings, three dead, including a 16-year-old teenager: in the night from Sunday to Monday, Marseille, France’s second largest city, experienced a new bloody episode, once again against the background of turf wars and “vendetta dynamics”. between drug dealers.
And this “particularly worrying dynamic (…) will continue in the coming months”, assessed the Marseille prosecutor, Dominique Laurens, commenting on “these bloodbaths in our cities, with unfortunately very young people in the first place”.
“This rejuvenation of the victims worries us very much,” the judge stressed: 21 and 23 years old for the two dead in the first shooting that occurred around midnight in the city of Castellas, in these working-class neighborhoods of northern Marseille plagued by poverty, unemployment and drug trafficking ; 16 years for the teenager who was killed half an hour later in the heart of the city, in the Joliette waterfront.
Averaging 27 years old ten years ago, the victims of gang settlements in Marseille are now four years younger, according to a study on the first nine months of 2022 cited by prosecutors.
A total of eight people were injured in these three shootings, including those towards the town of Aygalades, just minutes after that of Castellas. Among them was a 15-year-old teenager who was touched at La Joliette “still in very serious life prognosis (Monday night), in really very serious condition,” Ms Laurens said.
He and his slain comrade were known to deal in narcotics. The 15-year-old was sentenced by a juvenile judge on March 31, the magistrate said.
Opened on charges of murder in an organized gang, attempted murder in an organized gang and criminal organization, the investigation into these three shootings was transferred to the criminal investigation department.
A certainty for the Marseille prosecutor: these new tragedies are the result of “two forces in presence”, a “double logic”, “a logic of control of the territories, especially the city of paternelles, and a logic of vendetta, of reprisals”.
“This city is today the origin of almost all the attacks in Marseille in recent months, with two teams fighting over negotiating points and undoubtedly caught up in a kind of vendetta dynamic,” said Frédérique Camilleri, chief of police in Bouches-du-Rhône, Monday morning at AFP, via the Paternelle.
Here, in mid-February, a 17-year-old boy known as the “dealer” was lynched to death. The bullet-riddled body of a 20-year-old man was found there at the end of March and had been left on a vacant lot.
And the statistics of homicides against the background of drug trafficking will continue to accelerate in 2023, notes the Marseille prosecutor, with already 14 dead – 13 shots and the young man lynched at the paternelle – and 43 injured in just under three months , all in the second city of France.
In 2021 and 2022, 25 and 32 deaths were recorded within the jurisdiction of the Marseille court.
“Let them stop killing our children. We feel abandoned. We are waiting for help, for the politicians to try to defuse it all. They are babies (editor’s note: the victims), something must be done to help them not to get in or out of these aisles,” Zahia Meziene, spokeswoman for the collective of the victims’ families, demanded from Marseille on Tuesday afternoon. to the town of Castellas.
“In Marseille we are pilots, everything that happens here then happens in other cities. What scares me is that this type of behavior is spreading in cities that were not affected at all, like Nantes,” Ms Laurens recently told AFP, fearing “a worsening of the situation”.
Two men were shot dead in Rennes on March 28 in what looks like a drug trafficking reckoning. An extremely rare drama in the Breton capital.