Words are the raw material of thought. And a new word logically makes it possible to rethink a situation. This is the case in Marseille, where the city is entangled in a spiral of violence between clans of drug traffickers which has already killed 42 people this year, and injured 109 others, erasing the sinister “record” of 2022, with 31 dead. A level of violence never reached in a city that unfortunately has been used to settling scores since the 1980s.
It was in her last press release, relating to the death of a 23-year-old young man shot dead in the city of Rosiers on August 31, that Dominique Laurens, the public prosecutor of Marseilles drew the term ” narcicide”. Portmanteau word formed by the contraction of drug trafficker and homicide, the term “narcohomicide” aims to forge a more appropriate term than that of “settlement of scores” which, if it has no legal reality, described before a whole modus operandi and a typology of victims that we no longer find today in assassinations against the backdrop of drug trafficking.
What Dominique Laurens explained this Wednesday morning on France Info “The settling of scores has a meaning in police terms. We are not really in the notion of settling accounts, but really on homicides linked to drug-related banditry. The victims are really just people who are on narcotics points. They are not targeted for their specific participation in trafficking, but simply because they are there”. A definition to which sticks this young man killed in Les Rosiers, and who, according to the elements of the investigation communicated by the prosecution, was “originally from the center of France (…), convicted for acts of common law and unknown in terms of judiciary in Marseilles”. Coming to “coal” in Marseille, it was for this “jobber” apparently without stature in the hierarchy of drug trafficking a one-way trip. A profile of victims that investigators find more and more often in Marseille and which has therefore led justice to abandon the term “settlement of accounts”.
Younger victims, less “professional” killers
A settling of accounts, a term without any legal reality, is originally a police jargon used to describe an operating mode (commando, heavily armed, vehicle stolen, unloaded and then set on fire) targeting a certain type of victim (relatively high in the hierarchy of networks and strongly identified by police services). A description that no longer corresponds to the reality of most of the crimes committed in Marseilles by groups of drug traffickers over the past three to four years.
Already, at the end of 2022, the police had stopped talking about settling scores when they saw increasingly young victims dead in what were more akin to intimidation operations than targeted elimination. “Blind” actions that lead to the death of teenagers, like Rayanne, 14, shot down by a burst of Kalashnikov at the entrance to his Marronniers district.
To measure the depth of these developments, we will have to wait for the first homicide trials in recent years to be held. It will then be possible to publicly observe that both the profile of the killers has changed, again younger, like Mattéo, an 18-year-old young man, indicted in the spring for two murders, but also “less professional “. Gone are the meticulously carried out operations, with marking of the target vehicle, tracking and surveillance, as was recently demonstrated during the assize trial for the settlement of accounts committed on the A55 in February 2017.