Two men were indicted on Friday and imprisoned after the death of Jérémie Cohen, this young Jewish man fatally hit in February by a tram after being hit. The defendants, aged 27 and 23, were indicted on the count of “willful violence in a meeting” for one and “willful violence resulting in death without intention of giving it” for the second, specified Bobigny prosecutor Eric Mathais.
The two suspects had presented themselves spontaneously to the police on Tuesday then had been placed in police custody, announced in a press release the prosecution, which requested their placement in pre-trial detention.
The statements of the two suspects during their police custody, in particular on the “chronology of events”, suggest that “the violence would be linked to the behavior of the victim, to which they would have reacted by hitting him”, specified the parquet floor, without giving further details.
At this stage of the investigation, “there is still no objective element to characterize a discriminatory motive, in particular anti-Semitic, at the origin of the violence”, repeated the prosecutor of Bobigny, Eric Mathais.
On Wednesday February 16 around 8:00 p.m., Jérémie Cohen, 31 years old and with a slight disability, was crossing the railway tracks when he was hit by the tram in Bobigny (Seine-Saint-Denis), just after being hit by several young people. .
In cardiorespiratory arrest and victim of a head trauma, he died in hospital a few hours later.
According to the depositions of the two men, “two scenes of violence” followed one another. The video filmed by a witness and transmitted to the investigators concerned the second.
” To be careful “
In these images, widely relayed on social networks, we see the victim receiving violent punches, surrounded by a dozen people. The young man fell to the ground, got up and then ran across the road, looking disoriented, before being hit by the tram. The reasons for these two attacks remain to be determined, said the Bobigny prosecutor.
At the end of their police custody, the prosecution had requested for one of the suspects his indictment on the count of “willful violence in a meeting” and “willful violence resulting in death without intention to give it” for the second .
Violence resulting in death without intention to give it is punished by fifteen years of criminal imprisonment.
The investigation, which is continuing under the aegis of an examining magistrate, is being carried out by investigators from the judicial police of the department.
A few days before the first round of the presidential election, the affair took on a political dimension when the far-right candidate Eric Zemmour wondered if the young man had not “died because a Jew”. Marine Le Pen for her part evoked a “criminal act” which “could be an anti-Semitic murder”.
This drama reacted to the Elysée: the president and candidate Emmanuel Macron had asked for “complete clarity” on this affair which should not give rise to “political manipulation”.
Faced with the avalanche of political reactions, the Bobigny prosecutor spoke last week to indicate that the investigation, opened for “willful violence in a meeting”, did not “allow at this stage to establish” discriminatory grounds in the death of the young man.
During a press conference, Jérémie Cohen’s family had also called for “remain cautious” in the face of the hypothesis of an anti-Semitic motive.