Eight men linked to a far-right group were placed in police custody on Wednesday March 13 in Bordeaux as part of an investigation into violence during a university conference attended by two LFI deputies, according to sources judicial and close to the investigation.
“Police custody began [Wednesday] at 6 a.m.,” the Bordeaux prosecutor’s office told Agence France-Presse. The investigation was opened for voluntary violence with ITT less than eight days, violence without ITT and participation in a group formed with a view to preparing racist violence, said the same source, confirming information from BFM-TV.
Several of those held in police custody are identified as members of the “Bastide Bordeaux”, a small nationalist group, according to a source close to the investigation.
On December 8, 2022, LFI deputies Louis Boyard and Carlos Martens Bilongo announced they were filing a complaint after seeing their intervention at Montaigne University disrupted by dozens of individuals. According to the two elected officials, a group made up of “thirty far-right activists”, armed “with telescopic batons”, “tried to enter the amphitheater” where the two deputies were hosting a conference.
The incident caused the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, to react: “The police had to intervene yesterday to protect two deputies who had been threatened by several dozen individuals,” he declared in a tweet, without specifying the political color of the group of individuals in question. “Freedom of expression is a fundamental freedom and what happened is unacceptable,” he continued, inviting parliamentarians to file a complaint.
