The prosecution had requested their detention on remand. In the end, only one of the four police officers suspected of having violently beaten a young man in Marseille on the sidelines of the riots which followed Nahel’s death was imprisoned, the prosecution announced on Friday.
Suspected of having beaten a 21-year-old young man in the center of Marseille, on the night of July 1 to 2, the four officials had been placed in police custody on Tuesday as part of an open judicial investigation of the head of violence in a meeting by a person in charge of public authority having resulted in an ITT (total incapacity for work) greater than 8 days.
LBD shooting and rain of shots
In parallel with this judicial investigation, the IGPN had also been seized. Then hospitalized, a few days after the facts, Hedi had affirmed in the regional daily Provence being beaten by a group of four to five people whom he had identified as police officers from the anti-crime squad (BAC), after being shot in the temple by an LBD.
The heart of Marseille and its shopping streets were then in the grip of the riots which followed the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed in Nanterre by a police officer during a road check on June 27. Other French cities had been the scene of clashes, destruction and looting for several consecutive nights.
The suspicious death of a young man
Another investigation for possible police violence had been opened on July 4 by the Marseille prosecutor’s office, the day before that for the attack on Hedi, this time concerning the death of a 27-year-old young man, probably after a “violent shock to the level of the thorax” caused by a “flash-ball type” projectile in the city center of the Marseille city, during the same night from July 1 to 2.
Mohamed Bendriss, married, father of a child and whose widow is expecting a second child, had lost his life after feeling unwell while riding a scooter. It was during his autopsy that the trace of what could be the impact of an LBD shot was spotted on his chest. Again, the “police of police” had been seized.
So far, the IGPN has taken up at least 21 investigations “of a very different nature and seriousness” into the actions of the police during the demonstrations and violence following the death of Nahel, said on July 12 before the law commission of the National Assembly the head of the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN), Agnès Thibault-Lecuivre.