As investigations continue after a police officer opened fire on an individual armed with a knife in Bordeaux on Friday evening, the victim’s autopsy is to be carried out on Monday. 20 Minutes takes stock of what we know about this case.
Why did the police intervene on Friday evening?
On Friday evening, at 7:04 p.m., police officers from the Bordeaux police station were contacted “by the manager of a grocery store located on Rue d’Ornano in Bordeaux, following the theft of a knife with a long blade from her shop by an individual who returned to prowl in front of the store a few minutes after the theft,” the Bordeaux prosecutor’s office said in a press release. At 7:25 p.m., a patrol of four BAC officers who, “after initial fruitless searches had positioned themselves as surveillance next to the store, spotted the individual reported near the scene.” Seeing the police officers, he “turned around.” The police officers then got out of their vehicle and approached him to check him.
Why did a police officer open fire on the individual?
It was at the moment when they wanted to check him that “the individual displayed the stolen knife, brandishing it in a threatening manner and tried to flee,” explained the public prosecutor, Frédérique Porterie. Despite “repeated injunctions from the police officers” who surrounded him, “the man refused to drop his knife and turned towards the BAC officers to face them and try to attack them.” The individual then advanced towards one of the police officers, “the knife raised with the intention of hitting him.”
A first official used “the flash-ball launcher once without provoking any reaction from the man who, although apparently hit in the shoulder, continued to advance towards the crew in a threatening attitude.” One of his teammates then used his weapon “three times.” Hit by the shots, the assailant fell to the ground, dropping the knife.
After several attempts at resuscitation by the police, supported by the emergency services, the man was declared dead at 7:50 p.m.
Who was the individual shot by the police officer?
The individual was quickly identified as Mathieu D., aged 44 and living in Bruges, near Bordeaux. He had run away from the Charles-Perrens psychiatric hospital in Bordeaux where he was hospitalised. The forensic doctor dispatched to the scene “noted the presence of four impacts on the body of the deceased.”
What is the status of the investigation into the circumstances of the shooting?
Two investigations have been opened by the Bordeaux public prosecutor’s office, one for theft, threats with a weapon and attempted homicide of a person in a position of public authority, the other relating to the use of weapons by the two police officers, targeting acts of “voluntary homicide and violence with a weapon by persons in a position of public authority entrusted to the IGPN.”
The drug and alcohol tests of the officer who used his service handgun were negative. Investigators interviewed the three officers.
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“From the statements of the police officers and the analysis of videos seized in shops near the events, it is already clear that the man remained impervious to the police officers’ injunctions, that he continued to advance towards them despite an initial flash-ball shot in his direction, that he had a threatening and determined attitude throughout his advance towards the police officers and finally that he came into contact with them, cornering the perpetrator of the fatal shots against a vehicle parked on the side of the road.” At the time the police officer used his weapon, “the individual was a few centimetres away from the latter.”