Illegal immigration networks, pimping, rape. For three weeks, at the Marseille criminal court, justice will delve into the heart of the operation of the “Arrow Baga”, or “Supreme Vikings”, a Nigerian mafia with ultra-violent methods.
There were thirteen in the dock on Monday at the opening of the trial, thirteen men aged between 22 and 37, ten of whom appear detained. They formed the Marseille hierarchy of Arrow Baga, a former student fraternity described by the investigating judge as “a hierarchical and structured criminal organization, with its rules and rites, its artifices and its accessories”.
A dozen women prostituted by force
Among them, two successive heads of Arrow Baga in Marseille, a function called “Doctor One”. A third, who escaped to Italy, is the subject of an arrest warrant. Facing them, on the civil party side, around ten young women, prostituted by force and raped, and two associations.
Identifiable by their red outfits, the Arrow Baga are today widely established in France’s second city, like their compatriots and enemies of the Black Axes (the blacks) or the Eiyes (the Blues).
These Nigerian criminal groups make their profits in particular from prostitution. After crossing Libya then Italy, guided by the mirage of a job or training, young Nigerian women found themselves forced, upon their arrival in Europe, to repay tens of thousands of euros to their “Madame », a former prostitute who became a madam.
To subjugate them, their pimps use the fear of “djoudjou”, a rite practiced in Nigeria, with the threat of reprisals on their families. But there is also the weapon of rape, or even rape aggravated by the use of weapons. Facts which should be the responsibility of the Assize Court but which the investigating judge, in agreement with the victims, chose to criminalize as sexual assault.
Violence also against men
At the end of March 2020, while confinement kept prostitutes in their apartments in the Parc Corot city, one of the worst degraded condominiums in Marseille, twenty members of the Arrow Baga broke into the homes of four of them. For two hours, they will rape them and steal hundreds of euros from them, under threat of knives and a gun.
But violence is also used against men, to force them to join the gang (“cult”) or not to leave it. One of the defendants, “J-Boy”, was thus punished by the “Germans”, the members of the gang. “I no longer wanted to follow them in their activities of fighting, stabbing, stealing money, so they cut my wrists with a machete,” he told investigators.