Six men aged 23 to 28 were injured on the night of Monday June 5 to Tuesday June 6 in a shooting caused by a settling of scores in Grenoble, probably against a background of drug trafficking.
The heavy shooting took place around 1 a.m., in the sensitive district of La Villeneuve, in the south of the city, according to Grenoble prosecutor Eric Vaillant, near an important deal point, according to the daily Le Dauphiné which raised the alarm about the shooting.
“I woke up in the middle of the night, I thought it was firecrackers, because there are all the time. Then I heard a woman screaming, then I understood that it was not firecrackers, “testified to Agence France Presse (AFP) Héloïse, 20, who grew up in the neighborhood and lives just in near the scene of the shooting for a few months.
The young mother thinks it is a “settlement of scores” linked to the death of a 17-year-old in the neighborhood, shot dead in a hair salon in December. “It’s been going on for months, everyone is dying,” says the young woman, who is thinking of moving because of her little girl, while worrying about her “brothers and sisters” residing there.
According to police sources, four of the six victims, injured in the legs, were taken care of by the firefighters. The other two, affected in the legs and the thorax for one of the two, presented themselves in a clinic. The “attempted assassination” investigation was entrusted to the judicial police.
“More and more police interventions”
When the police arrived, a car fled, “with several impacts”, according to the police, who had been alerted following “several detonations”. It was a car belonging to one of the victims, who lived in Galerie de l’Arlequin, where the shooting took place. The six victims were around this car, and a second vehicle was also seen fleeing, said Mr. Vaillant.
These people were “in a group”, and would have fled when they “heard detonations”, without “knowing where” they came from, according to the testimony of one of them to the police.
Also interviewed by AFP, Marine, 35, an educator of young children working in the neighborhood, assures that “there are more and more police interventions” here. But when she started working at Villeneuve in 2013, “there were plenty of times when we had to come back urgently with the children, from the garden inside, to get to safety”.
“I think that in all of Grenoble, even in the city center, it sucks,” says this resident of the Abbaye district, three kilometers further north, where a man in his forties was shot dead in the middle of the street on May 31 by two men on scooters. In this same neighborhood, on the night of May 23 to 24, the body of a man was found in his burning car.
Climate of insecurity
“I think Mr. (Eric) Piolle (EELV mayor of Grenoble) will have to do something, perhaps reinforce the police force. I am not on the right but after a while people live in a climate of insecurity. It’s not normal, we are with children, we can take a stray bullet. (…) In Grenoble, the traffic is important and has generated a lot of conflict, ”she also denounces.
In an interview with AFP in October 2022, the director of the Departmental Directorate of Public Security (DDSP), Fabienne Lewandowski, without observing the appearance of new bands, had reported “territory wars in such a juicy business than that of drug trafficking”.
She had also noticed “an increase in the use of heavy weapons during narcotics settling of accounts”. The fight against this traffic is a “priority” alongside the prosecution and “we have multiplied by 2.5 the number of cases handled” since 2021. “The seizure of product creates a debt, this induces revenge, settlements of account,” she emphasized again.