Death of Nahel: Oise Hebdo publishes the name of the police officer who shot, Gérald Darmanin takes legal action

2023-07-06 22:33:39

Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin seized the public prosecutor after the weekly Oise Hebdo published the full name of the policeman who killed Nahel, in Nanterre, he said Thursday on Twitter. “The publication Oise Hebdo publishes personal information endangering the life of the family of the policeman in detention. Despite our requests to remove this irresponsible content, it persists. I seize the public prosecutor ”, assures Gérald Darmanin on Twitter.

The “publication” Oise Hebdo publishes personal information endangering the life of the family of the police officer in detention. Despite our requests to remove this irresponsible content, it persists. I seize the public prosecutor.

— Gérald DARMANIN (@GDarmanin) July 6, 2023

The local weekly Oise Hebdo published, this Thursday noon on its website, a portrait of the policeman who killed the young Nahel, in Nanterre, revealing his name, as well as the town in which he resides. Unsigned, this article retraces the journey of the 38-year-old brigadier, a former Brav-M and CSI 93, as revealed Release Wednesday.

Indignant reactions

“The name and the precise address had been on the Internet for six days”, defended the Parisian the director of the newspaper, Vincent Gérard, specifying that the article did not give the exact address of the policeman, but “just the name of a city”. Placed in pre-trial detention, the police officer is “currently safe”, he also estimated. “Given the scale of the case, his full name would have appeared sooner or later,” added Vincent Gérard, who concludes: “my job is to tell what is happening in the Oise. It’s the case “.

“It’s simply shameful,” comments Grégory Joron, the general secretary of the SGP Police-FO Unit union, asked by Le Parisien. “Our colleague and his family had already been threatened, his wife and child had to leave their home. Given the context, the increasing attacks on off-duty police officers, the dissemination of his surname and the city where he lives is an obvious endangerment… It does not serve the information in any way, the goal is therefore quite different and the well-known potential harm, ”adds the policeman, who says he alerted Gérald Darmanin’s office about the article. His union is also studying the possibility of filing a complaint.

Relayed on Twitter, where it had been seen nearly 200,000 times at 6:30 p.m., the publication also aroused many indignant reactions there. Denouncing a “serious breach” of respect for private life, Denis Jacob, the general secretary of the Alternative police union, affiliated to the CFDT, considered that the weekly thus put “in danger a woman and children by thus distilling their place of residence”. “If a tragedy were to happen because of such a revelation, you would be a co-author and would bear heavy criminal responsibility,” he also wrote.

“You don’t want to give his full address and the weapons to attack his family too?” “, also quipped the spokesperson for Reconquest, Samuel Lafont.

Known for his scandalous headlines on local miscellaneous events, the editorial line of Oise Hebdo has often gotten him in trouble with the law. In an article published in 2017, France 3 had thus identified “about thirty trials in 23 years”.