2022, new dark year for “settling of accounts” in Bouches-du-Rhône

The police prefecture has listed homicidal attempts linked to drug trafficking. Two assassinations took place during the Christmas weekend. The victims were 20 and 22 years old.

by Luc Leroux (Marseille, correspondent)

It was an ambush. On December 17, a 25 -year -old young man was shot down at the foot of the Castellas towers (15 ^{e ), one of the many cities in the northern districts of Marseille. Witnesses saw a white Clio, heard a burst of Kalashnikov. Just as this had been the case in May in the city supermarket parking lot, and in June when a 20 -year -old young man died in the shots. The Castellas, three shootings, three dead … A few days before the Harry-Sylvestre, the year 2022 is looming as a new dark year in terms of what in Marseille we used to name “settling of accounts “.}

The Bouches-du-Rhône police prefecture has listed since 1 ^{er January sixty facts of homicide or homicide attempt linked to drug trafficking in the department. Sixty shootings which caused the death of 29 men, two thirds of whom were under the age of 30. A balance sheet comparable to that of 2021, which had experienced 49 facts for 31 dead. Figures logically echoing with those of the Marseille prosecution, which specifies that it has, since the beginning of the year, open to an investigating judge 42 procedures for voluntary homicide and/or attempted voluntary homicide in organized gang. Organized gang, translate: against the backdrop of the drugs of narcotics. Thirty dead, twenty-eight injured since the beginning of the year, it is said in the prosecution. Almost 85 % of these files relate to the facts committed in the town of Marseille.}

To these official counts, it is advisable to add the assassination of a 20 -year -old man on the night of Saturday 24 to Sunday 25 December in the 14 ^e arrondissement of Marseille. It is the second homicide by bullets during the Christmas weekend, after that of a 22-year-old boy, Friday December 23 around 11 p.m., at the foot of the Mediterranean HLM, in the 13 ^{> arrondissement. This one had been preceded the same morning, reports the daily La Provence, of a shooting in a bar in the Belle-de-Mai, a client of which was injured by firearm fire.}

Conflict between rival bands

Two major conflicts between rival bands would have nourished this morbid accounting. According to the judicial police, the rivalries were strong, this year again, between two powerful teams, on the one hand, the Blacks – a historic band of traffickers which owes its name to the belonging of its members to the Comorian community -, On the other hand that of olive trees A, a city of 13 e arrondissement. We lend Kamel Méziani to have a high hand on this last point of sale and its branches in other Marseille cities. Several judicial meetings await Kamel Méziani: he will be reached in January 2023 on appeal after a conviction to fourteen years in prison for the traffic management and he will appear before the Assize Court for a role he disputes in a regulation of Accounts which had left two dead in the parking lot of a KFC in October 2016. As is often the case, the arrest in the fall of an influential black member, a thirty -something already condemned in a narcotic case, “paused” this conflict, but the judicial police feared the effects of the exit from prison of other eminent figures of this team.

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