“They are a bit of contract killers”, sums up a source familiar with the matter. While searching for the perpetrators of a shooting that killed one person last summer in the capital’s 11th arrondissement, the judicial police investigators uncovered a team of young criminals whom they suspect of being involved in several account settling, committed almost everywhere in France. According to information from Parisianconfirmed by several sources at 20 minutes, police officers from the Paris criminal brigade and the Central Office for the Fight against Organized Crime (OCLCO) arrested nine suspects on Monday, March 13. They were placed in police custody as part of the judicial investigation opened in July 2022, in particular counts of murder and attempted murder with premeditation in an organized gang, tells us the Paris prosecutor’s office.
It is a “very organized, mobile team, made up of people who commit ultra-violent actions throughout the territory”, specifies a police source. Investigators suspect them in particular of having been hired by a sponsor to eliminate Mamadou T., a 38-year-old man who was killed on July 18 in Paris. That evening, a Peugeot 308 stopped in front of a shisha bar, “La petite échée”, located at the corner of rue Breguet and rue Popincourt. Two men got out. One held a handgun, a 9mm, and the other a Kalashnikov. The duo opened fire in the direction of two men seated on the terrace.
A 16-year-old suspect already implicated
Mamadou T., who was known to the police for narcotics cases, died on the spot as a result of his injuries. Four other people, who received shards of glass, were more slightly injured. The Peugeot 308 used by the perpetrators of the shooting was discovered two days later by a BAC crew in the Pissevin district of Nîmes, near the Richard-Wagner shopping mall.
One of the two assailants, aged 16, was overpowered by customers and arrested by the police, while his accomplice fled. At the end of his police custody, he was indicted for “murder in an organized gang, attempted murder in an organized gang, acquisition and possession without authorization of weapons of categories A and B in a meeting, and association of criminals with a view to crimes and misdemeanors” and placed in pre-trial detention. As revealed 20 minutesthis teenager born in 2006 in Mayotte is involved in another case of attempted murder.
A settling of accounts “against the background of drug trafficking”?
On July 3, 2021, Lyam*, then 15, stabbed a 16-year-old in Vieux-Menton during a fight. He was arrested three days later by the Beausoleil municipal police. Lyam was then taken into custody and brought to court where he was brought before a juvenile judge. A judicial investigation for attempted murder and violence with weapons was then opened. In February 2022, the judge of freedoms and detention of the Nice judicial court released him and placed him under judicial control. “The case is still under review. Everyone has been heard, we are now waiting for him to be fired,” confided to 20 minutes the victim’s lawyer, Me Mireille Otto-Oberthur.
Five months after his release, the young man was therefore arrested in Paris, a weapon in his hand. He is suspected of having been paid, with other accomplices, by sponsors who would have placed a contract on the head of the victim. The investigators are still wondering about their identity and their motivations, but the hypothesis of a settling of accounts “against the background of drug trafficking” seems to be favored. The nine other suspects arrested on Monday “are adults but all very young”, explains a good connoisseur of the file.
*Name has been changed