The trial of a new face of drug trafficking in Marseille. The one where young wandering minors, coming from other regions of France attracted by the sirens of easy money, fall prisoners of the drug trafficking network which was to enrich them quickly. But the law is implacable. At the slightest deviation, bullying, violence, torture, when it is not death at the end of the road. This story has one face, that of Mathieu (let’s call him that) sequestered and tortured with a blowtorch the night of August 12 to 13, 2019 in a cellar in an deprived city of Marseille. The trial of his four suspected attackers opened at the Aix-en-Provence Assize Court. It should last until Friday. 20 minutes make the point.
Who is Matthew?
Mathieu is an assumed first name. He was 16 years old in August 2019, when he left Chartres (Eure-et-Loir) and his child welfare home where he had been placed for a few months to reach Marseille and join, as a little hand, the network of drug trafficking in Micocouliers (13th arrondissement). He was recruited as a “charcoal” (salesman) and began working on August 9.
Coming to testify Monday afternoon at the trial of the four accused of having tortured him, the young man described a youth, passed from foster families to homes and “a life which has stopped” since that day. “He never got over the ordeal. […] For me, his life ended on the day of the events […] The more time goes on, the more I see that he is closing himself off. We are at a stage where he no longer leaves his house,” lamented the lawyer, Master Xavier Torre.
What happened in the cellar?
The court released photos of the young man during his hospitalization on Monday morning. We see his arms and trunk completely covered in bandages. In another photo, where he appears partially naked, dozens of cigarette burns are visible. Larger, pinkish spots are characteristic of burns inflicted on larger areas.
Before being taken “into the cellar”, in this case an abandoned association premises, Mathieu was severely beaten by around ten individuals. He is then taken there and Mathieu is then completely naked, tied to a chair with electric cable, beaten and burned with a cigarette. “In the cellar, there were a lot of people, they hit me, they made me snort coke,” he says.
In the middle of the night, while he is blindfolded, two “grown-ups” tell him that he is going to die. “They burned my genitals. […] I screamed in pain. » His ordeal ends after this night of torture when two “big guys” take him to the hospital.
Why so much hatred?
The world of drug trafficking is ruthless. Mathieu was kidnapped and tortured for having “flouted” a “law” of the networks: on their land, no one else is authorized to sell drugs. To understand this, we have to go back to when he took office on August 9. He was quickly arrested but shortly before managed to hide the contents of his bag: 15 grams of cocaine and 10 bars of hash.
Taken before a children’s judge, he is placed in a home pending his return to Chartres, accompanied by an educator. He ran away, recovered the hidden drugs and, on August 12, tried to resell them at the foot of the A6 building in the Félix-Pyat city, but without the authorization of those responsible for this hotbed of trafficking in Marseille.
Who are the accused?
Three of the four accused, aged between 22 and 30, claimed they were innocent and the fourth said: “I admit to the beating outside the premises, but I had nothing to do with what happened Next. » When studying their personalities, they recounted difficult childhood periods and situations of dropping out of school.
Several witnesses were heard, including the brother of one of the young men who said on the stand: “The city is not an excuse. » He “entered a tunnel effect” because of his associations, he regretted. An integration advisor spoke about another of the accused, insisting on the fact that this young man “does not come from a privileged neighborhood, nor from a privileged family”.
In November 2022, one of Mathieu’s torturers, tried by the juvenile court, was sentenced to ten years in prison for kidnapping and sequestration accompanied by torture and barbaric acts. Mathieu had identified him as the one who had forced him to take cocaine. The four major defendants face life imprisonment.