In the event of a trial, the hierarchy in charge of the intervention in a Parisian Burger King during act 3 of the “yellow vests”, will not appear. The commander of the CRS company accused of violence and his superior police commissioner were placed under the status of assisted witnesses in this procedure. On December 1, 2018, a dozen CRS entered and beat several demonstrators and at least one journalist, some lying on the ground, with batons. The scene had been filmed by several journalists.
On March 31, 2022, Gilbert S., 57, named himself in a letter to the judge as responsible for the intervention in this Burger King near the Champs-Elysées, and also targeted Patrice R., 54, commissioner and that day transmission belt of orders from the police headquarters. “If personnel must be indicted and sent back to court, then I obviously deserve the same fate, just like the other authorities present in front of this establishment and who validated, at least tacitly by their inaction, the modus operandi used, ”he wrote, according to elements of the investigation of which AFP became aware on Thursday.
Nine CRS indicted
In this symbolic file of the demonstrations of the “yellow vests” and close to its end, nine CRS have been indicted since June 2020 for aggravated violence on the demonstrators, the last of which, Frédéric P., on January 26. Since the start of the investigation, the company based in Chalon-sur-Saône has presented its intervention as inseparable from the chaos of act 3 of the “yellow vests”, with violence in Paris, significant damage to the Arc de Triumph, the blinding of a demonstrator by a shot from a defense bullet launcher (LBD), and in Puy-en-Velay the burning of the prefecture.
The Parisian investigating judge accepted the request of the commander of CRS 43 by summoning him, as well as Patrice R., for indictments for “voluntary abstention from preventing aggravated violence”. For a day, Gilbert S. recounted in October an interminable face-to-face with “the insurrection” and the fear of “passing from life to death”. He acknowledged the use by his troops in the afternoon of “non-regulatory” methods to defend themselves, announced by radio to his superiors: “tight tear gas fire, thrown in a bell from a disencirclement grenade”, etc. His company alone “used 1,950 tear gas canisters that day”, or “80% of what we fired from 1990 to 2018”, he counts.
According to Gilbert S., the intervention at the Burger King is only one episode of this “hardest day of his career”. In the restaurant, his troops are “very rough”, thinking of dislodging “looters”. They “have lost their discernment”, he concedes. Who should have stopped the intervention? He and the commissioner, believes Gilbert S., who feels “responsible”. “The hierarchy may have to take some responsibility. If I had been lucid, (the CRS) did not intervene”, he yields again, while according to one of his subordinates, Captain Jérôme P., he gave the order to intervene. In interrogation in December, Commissioner Patrice R. also evokes the fear of dying and a climate of “war”, but “clearly” disputes having ordered to dislodge the demonstrators.
Assisted witness status
At the time, the violence identified by the courts appeared to him “all the same within reason, given what we saw during the day”. “Yes”, the CRS “go a little hard”, but “it goes quickly”, there “is the tunnel effect”, and “several authorities” are “nested”, he defends. Gilbert S. and Patrice R. emerged as witnesses assisted by the interrogations: in the event of a trial, they would not appear.
In view of this recent development, Nathan Arthaud, victim of 27 baton blows by six police officers, is “worried about this end of the legal proceedings, all the more so since no significant administrative sanction has been imposed”, commented his Counsel, Mr. Moad Nefati. “The judicial authority is still struggling to prosecute the administrative authorities who have nevertheless given manifestly illegal orders. We must break this glass ceiling in cases of police violence, ”asked Me Arié Alimi, lawyer for two demonstrators.