Monday evening, around a hundred people wandered on the peninsula, in the center of Lyon, before being dispersed by the police. This demonstration organized by the ultra-right (police term for the violent extreme right) was not authorized. After this incident, eight people, six men and two women, were arrested and placed in police custody, the prefecture said on Tuesday.
They were arrested “later in the evening”, in the “fifth arrondissement”, a stronghold district of Lyon’s ultra-right, the prefecture said. In videos published on social networks, notably on the Facebook page of the group “Les Remparts”, masked individuals hold a banner “immigration kills” and shout “Islam outside Europe”. A gathering “for Thomas” in another district, at the call of the Remparts, had been banned by the prefecture.
The death of Thomas as a standard
Les Remparts is a small ultra-right group from Lyon built on the ashes of Génération Identitaire, a collective dissolved in March 2021. Earlier in the day Monday, six people were sentenced to six to ten months in prison for having participated in ultra-right demonstrations, in the Monnaie district of Romans-sur-Isère, from which some of the suspects linked to the Crépol drama come.
Seven other people who participated in the same events must be tried on February 6 before the Valencia criminal court, according to the prosecution. Since the tragedy, small ultra-right groups as well as the parliamentary extreme right and part of the right have commented extensively on the death of Thomas, 16, which in their eyes illustrates the rise in insecurity in rural areas. Lyon is one of the strongholds of the ultra-right in France: between 300 and 400 people are members of the movement there, according to local authorities.