A 19-year-old suspect was indicted and placed in pre-trial detention for the murder of a 14-year-old teenager in Saint-Denis, the Bobigny prosecutor’s office announced on Sunday January 21.
Around 7:45 p.m. on Wednesday January 17, a 14-year-old schoolboy from Saint-Denis, named Sedan, was stabbed on the metro platform at the Basilique de Saint-Denis station, on line 13. The young man, seriously injured, died despite cardiac massage carried out by the firefighters.
The day after the tragedy, a 19-year-old young man went to the department’s judicial police, responsible for investigating the teenager’s death. After forty-eight hours in police custody, he was presented on Saturday evening to an investigating judge at the Bobigny court, who decided to indict him and imprison him.
The accused, also a resident of Saint-Denis, reported to investigators that he had encountered a group of people in the metro “with whom he had already had disagreements”, including Sedan. “He [the stabber] had the feeling that the situation was going to escalate. He armed himself with a knife and hit the first member of the group,” detailed the public prosecutor. The young man then fled via the metro.
Two violent deaths in the same week in the city
A few hours before this murder, an 18-year-old high school student was violently attacked with baseball bats in front of his school, in what amounts to a “punitive expedition”, according to the municipality. The victim, Farid A., succumbed to his injuries on Saturday. “Regarding these facts, the blatant homicide investigation is actively continuing,” declared the Bobigny public prosecutor’s office. But “no link seems to exist in the state of the investigations between this murder” and the death of Sedan.
These two violent deaths, the exact causes of which are not immediately established, occur against a backdrop of clashes between young people from different neighborhoods for several days in the commune of 113,000 inhabitants, the most populous in the department.
Saturday morning, several hundred people gathered in front of Saint-Denis town hall in memory of Sedan. This demonstration, in the presence of many local elected officials, was the occasion for vibrant calls for calm and a refusal of violence, in a context where nerves are on edge.
“I ask everyone, all their friends, no violence, no revenge! Not in the name of Sedan, not in the name of Saint-Denis, not in the name of a neighborhood that we appropriate! », exhorted Sedan’s big brother, Mory, into the microphone in front of a crowd mainly made up of young people. “A little brother, a son, lost his life. At 14, listen up, 14,” he said. “I call on you to respect your parents, to listen, not to fight, not to be violent, because it often ends badly! “, he insisted, seriously.
“Saint-Denis loses another of its children. This is an absolute tragedy (…). Everyone must take the measure of their responsibility to put an end to the cycle of violence,” called the town hall of Saint-Denis in a press release on Saturday evening, hammering home its “message”: “the refusal of violence between and towards our young people.” .
The tense context in Saint-Denis led to a strengthening of the police force and the ban on gatherings by the town hall until Monday. The authorities also asked parents to keep their children at home during the weekend. The socialist mayor of Saint-Denis, Mathieu Hanotin, declared on Franceinfo on Sunday that all schools in the town would be “secure” for the return to classes on Monday.