2024-01-18 07:37:04
Théodore Luhaka at the Bobigny courthouse, January 9, 2024, for the trial of three police officers suspected of violence during his arrest, in February 2017. BENOIT TESSIER / REUTERS
The Théo affair is first and foremost the “Castelain affair”, and this trial, that of a gesture: a baton blow which turned Théodore Luhaka’s existence upside down, and will leave the 29-year-old young man with painful and permanent after-effects.
On the seventh day of the hearing, Wednesday January 17, police officer Marc-Antoine Castelain explains himself before the Seine-Saint-Denis Assize Court, in Bobigny, and it is difficult to believe that this 34-year-old man with an all-purpose physique, neither tall nor strong, thin glasses and bald head, clasped hands grinding behind his back, is the same as the one in uniform who cheerfully bludgeons Théodore Luhaka on screen – eight blows in forty seconds, including the last one is debated.
For the umpteenth time since the start of the trial, images of the arrest which degenerated on February 2, 2017 in Aulnay-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis) are broadcast. In the front row, Théo looks at the ground. At the helm, Marc-Antoine Castelain comments: “I never intended to cause this” ; “I don’t take the blow disproportionately” ; “The situation was very stressful, the adrenaline was high.”
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He says again and again that his “thrust” – “a gesture learned in the police academy”that he had “not used to doing” – was supposed to touch “upper thigh” in order to “to bend” the young man who refused to let himself be handcuffed, and to extract one of his two colleagues who was on the ground in a “very compromising situation”. Impossible to place a classic whiplash due to the “restricted field” and the risk of hitting his two colleagues struggling with Théo.
The imprecise thrust caused a rupture of the sphincter and a ten-centimeter injury to the anal canal. Marc-Antoine Castelain’s voice quavers: “It haunts me, you can’t believe it. Every day I think about Mr. Luhaka’s injury, every day I prayed for him to recover. I caused a terrible injury, without intending to do so. » Marc-Antoine Castelain faces up to fifteen years in prison.
“I recognize, it’s not regulatory, not ethical”
The Théo affair is also the “Castelain-Dulin-Hochart affair”. Because the jurors will have to rule on other violent acts committed in the wake of the disputed baton blow by Marc-Antoine Castelain and his two colleagues, Jérémie Dulin and Tony Hochart, gestures to which the lawyers of the person who suffered them agree as much of importance.
While Théo is handcuffed, Marc-Antoine Castelain shoots him for example “a back of the hand” in the face. Explanation of the accused: “I’m next to him, I don’t understand why he had this opposition, I talk to him, he doesn’t answer me, and I have this gesture. I admit, it’s not regulatory, not at all ethical. Today, I regret it, and I apologize for that. But it’s an instinctive gesture, my desire is not to hurt him, I didn’t destroy his face.
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