The victim suffered a serious foot injury and suffered from the accident in his professional career. The State was ordered Thursday to pay some 281,000 euros to a man injured by the accidental shooting of a gendarme in 2017, during a presidential visit to a railway site in Charente.
The judgment of the administrative court of Poitiers also condemns the State, whose “no-fault liability” had been retained by the judges in a previous decision, to reimburse approximately 294,000 euros to Health Insurance, the sum incurred for the coverage of the victim, aged 43 today.
At the hearing, on October 12, the latter had claimed more than a million euros from the State, while the Ministry of the Interior, in defense, had asked the court to reassess “in fairer proportions » the damages suffered by the applicant – to whom he offered 27,000 euros to settle all accounts – and the CPAM of Gironde.
Several foot surgeries
On February 28, 2017, Samuel Magre worked as maître d’hôtel on a maintenance site of the Bordeaux Paris TGV line in Villognon-en-Charente, where a reception was organized as part of a trip by President François Hollande, when he was injured in the right foot by the accidental shot of a sniper from the national gendarmerie, responsible for securing the scene.
The bullet caused “a major physical alteration” with severing of the Achilles heel, fracture of the tibia and injury to the flexor nerve, requiring several surgical operations.
The State’s no-fault liability having been held, six years after the events, “due to the use by the police of devices involving exceptional risks”, the administrative court of Poitiers had ordered a medical expertise to assess all the harm suffered by the victim.
The judges noted in particular the loss of professional earnings of the former maître d’hôtel, who only returned to work in 2022 as a temporary order picker, a job which provides him with remuneration “very much lower” than that that he perceived before the accident.