“It was very painful, it started from the thigh and went up to the sciatic nerve”. Like Noémie, dozens of cases of bites in night establishments in night establishments in recent weeks in France, leading to the opening of several investigations. An epiphenomenon that the authorities have trouble understanding.
They may have taken place hundreds of kilometers apart, but their stories are the same: an evening in a nightclub or at a concert, a stinging sensation in the thigh, shoulder, arm or ankles. , followed, for some, by malaise, nausea, hot flushes or loss of balance which sometimes led them to the hospital.
Probably underestimated cases
This is the case of Noémie. In the evening in a nightclub in Béziers, on the night of April 17 to 18, the young woman felt a sting, before feeling unwell, “eyes rolled back”, a few minutes later, and being taken away by her friends. to emergencies. But for Noémie, the nightmare does not end there. The student claims to have remained “paralyzed on the right side for two days”. And his case is not isolated. Like her, dozens of complaints have been filed by victims throughout the territory.
In Nantes, since mid-February and the reopening of night establishments, 47 facts have been brought to the attention of the police and around fifteen complaints have been filed. Same thing in Béziers, Grenoble, Bourges, Amiens or more recently Rennes and Montauban. Several investigations for “administration of harmful substances” and “voluntary violence with a weapon” have been opened in the territory. “There are currently 53 investigations in the police zone currently, but in fact, it is probably more. It’s very difficult to quantify,” admits a police source to 20 minutes. “For the moment, each prosecutor’s office is seized, there is not yet centralization at the national level, but it is not excluded”, she adds.
No traces of drugs
The number of people possibly affected is all the more difficult to assess as certain products “can no longer be detected after just a few hours”, such as GHB, “the rape drug”, which remains only 6 hours in the blood and 12 hours in urine. The victims are invited to come forward “without delay to the police station or the gendarmerie of their residence, or to the nearest hospital center in order to take immediate urine and blood samples, in order to determine whether they have actually been victims of the administration of a harmful substance,” Béziers prosecutor Raphaël Balland said last week.
In the corridors of the police, the phenomenon nevertheless raises questions on the merits. None of the toxicological analyzes carried out to date in France has revealed the presence of narcotics. “There is no trace of any product. Moreover, we do not even know by what the possible substance was administered, if it is a syringe or something else”, confides the police source to 20 minutes, who believes that “everything is possible”. The doctors also worrying about a risk of contamination with hepatitis or HIV because of a non-sterile syringe, all the victims received preventive treatment.
A “copycat” phenomenon?
The motive of the attackers, too, leaves the investigators perplexed. Of all the complaints filed, only one in Voiron, near Grenoble, reports a theft of a phone, watch and bank card after a bite. For the others, no theft or attempted sexual assault. Within the police, we do not rule out the possibility of injections with syringes without any product. “We cannot exclude that we are in the case of a person who stings to scare”, had also affirmed the public prosecutor of Nantes, Renaud Gaudeul, during his press conference in mid-March.
If the hypothesis were verified, how to explain the multiplication of cases across the territory? The always tempting theory of the copycat, which acts after hearing about it in the media, is not ruled out, without more certainty. To date, no syringe has been found and no suspect has been identified on the surveillance cameras of the establishments, except in Nantes, where a man had been arrested and placed in police custody, at the end of February, before be released. So the mystery remains.