Saturday morning, several activists from the environmentalist collective Extinction Rebellion (XR) carried out a “punching”, but non-violent, action in the Westfield Euralille shopping center, in Lille. Their target: sales. But the action degenerated during the intervention of the center’s security service. According to the collective, an activist was arrested by security guards, kidnapped and assaulted.
For XR, the sales are “a period of real consumerist madness, which leaves behind a heavy ecological and human toll”. While we are in the middle of it, environmentalists have launched several actions, including one called “olfactory action”. It is a question of “seizing up the machine, by emptying the stores of their customers thanks to the diffusion of odors carefully selected for their repellent effect”. Here, in this case, a homemade preparation inspired by the smell of vomit. This is what the Lille activists were working on when the security guards came upon them.
“They put me directly on the ground and hit me”
One of the activists, aged 24, had left the shopping center when three private security agents caught him, explains to 20 minutes a spokesperson for the collective. A photo that we obtained attests that the arrest took place on a public highway. “They grabbed me violently and dragged me inside the store,” explains the young man. The security guards then took him to a place inaccessible to the public. “They put me on the ground and hit me. I took blows to the face, neck, kicks in the back,” he lists. “I was then dragged again, taken to some sort of garage/parking lot and hit again when I was on the ground,” the young man continues.
Violence attested by a medical certificate established by a doctor from the Lille University Hospital, which 20 minutes was able to consult, and whose conclusion was “fracture of the left middle finger and multiple contusions”. According to the activist’s testimony, his ordeal lasted nearly 40 minutes until the police, notified by the shopping center, arrived. “This is the first time that an activist has been reassured to see the police,” the spokesperson for XR Lille told us. Taken to the metro police station at Lille Flandres station, the young man was fined 135 euros for “throwing waste” before being released.
On the advice of the collective’s lawyer, he then went to the Lille central police station at the beginning of the afternoon to file a complaint against “X” for acts of violence. In this complaint, that 20 minutes was able to consult, there is no mention of any ITT. According to the collective, the young man must consult a forensic doctor on Tuesday, the only one authorized to issue an ITT. For XR’s lawyer, the security agents involved could be prosecuted for kidnapping in a meeting, arbitrary detention and intentional assault and battery. Contacted by 20 minutesthe management of the Euralille shopping center did not follow up.