They had been in custody since Tuesday morning. Three Raid police officers in Marseille were indicted for “violence with a weapon resulting in death without intention of giving it” this Thursday, August 10 as part of an investigation into the death of Mohamed Bendriss, a 27-year-old man in margin of the riots in early July. The investigating judge decided to place the three men under judicial control, “combined with measures prohibiting contact with civil parties and prohibiting them from participating in the context of their professional activity as police officers in interventions concerning urban violence and major events on the public highway”, says the prosecution. They thus escape pre-trial detention.
On the night of July 1 to 2, while the center of Marseille was plagued by degradation and looting, Mohamed Bendriss, 27, lost his life after falling ill while riding a scooter. It was during the autopsy of the body of this married man, father of a child and whose widow is expecting a second child, that the trace of what could be the impact of a shooting of LBD (defense ball launcher), according to the first elements of the investigation consulted by Release And Mediapart.
Multiple Raid Agent shots
That night, revolts in working-class neighborhoods were in progress after the death of Nahel M., in Nanterre, on June 27, killed while driving a car by the shooting of an agent. In Marseille, several stores are looted and several fires are lit in the streets of the city center. Videos of this evening, posted on social networks, attest to the violence of the police repression and in particular multiple shootings of Raid agents with LBDs and 12 gauge rifles equipped with ammunition called “beanbags”. It was also that night that Hedi R. was seriously injured by police officers from the city’s anti-crime brigade, four of whom were indicted for aggravated willful violence and one of them, placed in custody. custody.
The prosecution, estimating in early July “likely” that the death of Mohamed Bendriss was “caused by a violent shock to the thorax caused by the firing of a Flash-Ball type projectile” (another name of the LBD), had opened a judicial investigation for “fatal blows with a weapon”. Which was entrusted to the judicial police and the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN), the police force.
A total of five police officers were taken into custody on Tuesday morning before the Marseille prosecutor’s office lifted the custody of two of them in the evening. Other police officers had also been summoned to be heard as “witnesses”.