The diagnosis is reserved for one of the demonstrators injured during the violent clashes which took place on Saturday during a demonstration against agricultural water reserves in Deux-Sèvres, confirmed on Sunday March 26, the Niort prosecution.

An investigation has been opened “to determine the exact nature” of the serious injuries of a total of three protesters and “the circumstances in which” these people were injured, prosecutor Julien Wattebled said in a press release. The organizers of the demonstration said since Saturday that one of these wounded was between life and death.

According to a new report established by the prosecution at 1 p.m. with the emergency services and hospitals, twenty-nine gendarmes were injured, including two placed in absolute emergency without their lives being in danger, one touched in the groin, the other with respiratory trauma. According to the same source, seven demonstrators were taken care of by the emergency services, including three in absolute emergency: a 30-year-old man with a head injury, “whose life prognosis remains engaged at this stage”, a 19-year-old woman year old with facial trauma and a 27 year old man with a foot fracture.

On Sunday, protest organizers accused the government of deploying “a massive crackdown.” According to elected officials present at the demonstration on Saturday, 200 demonstrators were injured, 40 of them seriously, and one person whose life is in danger remained in intensive care on Sunday.

“Violent Drift of the State”

“We have witnessed scenes of war” which illustrate “a violent drift of the State”, launched during a press conference the European Ecology-The Greens (EELV) MEP Benoît Biteau, the day after this demonstration , banned by the prefecture, which gathered between 6,000 people, according to the authorities, and 30,000, according to the organizers.

More than 3,000 gendarmes and police had been mobilized to defend the basin (name given by opponents to these reserves intended for agricultural irrigation) under construction in Sainte-Soline, as part of a project which provides for sixteen, d a total capacity of 6 million cubic meters.

At midday on Saturday, violent clashes erupted outside the construction site between radical militants who used “firework mortars, Roman candles and Molotov cocktails”, and the police who fired more of 4,000 grenades (tear gas and disencirclement) and used LBDs, in response to the attackers, according to the authorities.

The government denounced on Saturday “an intolerable surge of violence” from the demonstrators, but the organizers blame the clashes on the police.

“Several cases of obstruction of rescue”

“They were the ones who fired first to keep away” the demonstrators, said Mr. Biteau, alongside representatives of the agricultural union Confédération paysanne, the collective Bassines non merci and the Uprisings of the Earth movement. Like the national secretary of EELV, Marine Tondelier, the day before, they denounced the intervention of a “squadron of quads” against elected officials who were protecting the wounded.

Observers from the League for Human Rights (LDH) have reported “several cases of obstruction of relief” by the police, on which they will report. “The observations made are far removed from the official discourse on the violence of the demonstrators”, added Sunday the Poitou-Charentes regional committee of the LDH.

The authorities attributed the delay in the emergency response on Saturday to violence by activists against the gendarmes who had to secure their access to the site.