Until a week ago Nahel was that kid from ‘banlieue’, from Nanterre, the popular neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris where he lived. He came from a humble family, he was irregular with his studies, but he worked to get money and help his mother. The police had him on file for minor things, especially for disobedience. He did not have any serious cause.
On Tuesday morning, a police officer shot him at a checkpoint in Nelson Mandela Square, in Nanterre, when he was behind the wheel of a car. He was driving without a license. According to the police version, he had disobeyed the order to stop and was driving recklessly. He died the next hour. He was 17 years old.
Today Nahel has become the symbol of the boredom of the residents of these neighborhoods, of this new revolt in the banlieues of France. Children and grandchildren of immigrants live in these neighborhoods, they are French, but they feel that they are treated as if they were second-class citizens and they criticize the racism of the forces of order.
Most of the neighbors say that Nahel was kind and affectionate and insist that he was not a criminal. He was an only child and his mother raised him alone. They lived in the Pablo Picasso neighborhood and he made money as a delivery man. He had enrolled in a course to be an electrician and played rugby.
His lawyers have insisted that he did not have any open legal proceedings. At the time of the events, the agents stopped him after seeing that the Mercedes he was driving was “circulating in the bus lane at high speed,” the Nanterre prosecutor said on Thursday. He was traveling with two other boys. The toxicological tests that were carried out were negative and neither “narcotics nor dangerous objects were found inside the vehicle.”
Almost nothing has come out about his origins, although the Algerian embassy has issued a statement in which it regrets the death of the young man and asks the French Government to “fully assume its duty of protection, aware of the security that must be benefit our citizens in their land of asylum”.
In the midst of the violence that is shaking France after the death of Nahel, his mother sent a conciliatory message by assuring, in an interview with the BFM chain, that she does not blame the forces of order or the entire Police for the death of her son : “I do not blame the system, but the man,” he said. On the day of her death, the mother had declared to the French media: “This Tuesday he kissed me, he told me: ‘Mom, I love you’. I said goodbye and said: ‘I love you, be careful'” .
On Thursday, at the demonstration that took place in Nanterre in his memory, the march was filled with kids who were in a gang or with their parents, who cheered on the boy’s mother and wore T-shirts with the slogan “Justice for Nahel”.
One who was about his age carried a box of masks and handed them out to people to protect themselves from the tear gas fired by the police to disperse the demonstration. This happened in Nelson Mandela Square, near the place where Nahel lost his life and today is covered in flowers.
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