Justice refers to the “complexity” of this case and a victim with “significant injuries”. Since Friday, June 30, Aimène Bahouh, 25, has been in a coma after he received in the head, as his relatives told Le Monde, a beanbag, (“bag of beans”), a projectile under form of a cotton bag containing tiny pellets fired by a RAID policeman in Mont-Saint-Martin (Meurthe-et-Moselle). Catherine Galen, public prosecutor at the Val-de-Briey judicial court, then opened an investigation in the act of “violence with a weapon by a person holding public authority”, entrusted to the general inspectorate of the national police ( IGPN).
“Faced with the complexity of the investigations remaining to be carried out”, Ms. Galen announced in a press release, published Friday evening, the opening of a judicial investigation and the co-referral of investigating magistrates within the framework of the pole of the instruction of Nancy. Thus, the Val-de-Briey prosecution will divest next week “in favor of the Nancy prosecution”.
Earlier in the day, the victim’s family had filed a complaint for “attempted intentional homicide”.
A “terrifying” night
In her press release, the public prosecutor recalls that the state of health of Mr. Bahouh, in intensive care at the neurological department of the hospital in Arlon, a nearby town in Belgium, is “stationary but worrying”. According to the statement, his involvement in urban violence is not “established” at this stage. According to his relatives and the two friends they were accompanying, Mr. Bahouh was driving a car, window down, and going to nearby Luxembourg to buy cigarettes and other sweets at a service station, when he received the projectile. His injuries “appear a priori consistent with a beanbag shot,” according to Ms. Galen.
The magistrate also explains the context, that of a night of riots during which the eleven RAID agents – “committed[s]” in this town of barely 10,000 inhabitants to “ensure the safety of people and property” as tweeted by the prefect of Meurthe-et-Moselle, Arnaud Cochet – were targeted: stones and “powerful mortars” were thrown in their direction from numerous pedestrians and passing vehicles. As a result, officers of this elite unit “repeatedly made use of their various non-lethal intermediate weapons, exclusively, including LBDs, grenades, and 12-gauge weapons that project beanbags.”
In the Val-Saint-Martin district where the tragedy took place, residents who say they did not participate in the riots, had assured Le Monde that they were “targeted” by members of the RAID during that night “terrifying”. Some have been affected. There are also impacts on cars. Also in the same area, at the corner of rue de Marseille and rue de Verdun where, according to these testimonies, these heavily equipped police officers would have been hidden or lying, according to them, in the bushes. “Young people told me that it was shooting at all costs, assured Serge de Carli, the mayor of Mont-Saint-Martin (various left). I asked questions, an investigation is underway. »
Yassine Bouzrou, the lawyer for the victim’s family – the same one following Nahel M.’s case – explains to Le Monde that he “finds that the public prosecutor of Val-de-Briey has shown a lot of reservations that at this stage my client cannot be accused of anything”. He adds: “Nor did she seek to criminalize the victim as her colleagues too often do. The investigations will be able to continue and demonstrate that a RAID agent most likely fired on my client. »
