MADRID, 26 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) –
A 30-year-old man who participated in the environmental protest on Saturday in Sainte-Soline, in west-central France, against agricultural dams is in critical condition and is torn between life and death, according to the Prosecutor’s Office. of Poitiers.
The man has a head injury resulting from a strong impact, while two other protesters were treated with absolute urgency: a 19-year-old woman suffering from facial trauma and a 27-year-old man with a broken foot.
In addition, a total of 29 gendarmes were injured, including 2 who are in an absolute emergency without their lives in danger, according to the balance of the Prosecutor’s Office, still “provisional”. Two journalists were also hospitalized with a relative emergency, according to the BFMTV network.
Prosecutor Julien Wattebled has announced an investigation “to determine the exact nature” of the serious injuries of a total of three protesters and “the circumstances in which” these people were injured.
The organizers, Land Uprisings, have assured that there are 200 injured demonstrators, 40 of them seriously, as a result of the violent clashes with the Police.
The demonstration was unauthorized and brought together some 6,000 people, according to the authorities, 30,000 according to the organizers. The activists wanted to occupy the agricultural reservoir to denounce this practice, which they consider implies the privatization of a public resource such as water.
The government described the incidents as a “wave of intolerable violence” for which it blames the protesters, but organizers attribute responsibility for the clashes to the police.
This incident adds to the episodes of violence in the recent demonstrations against the pension reform, with serious riots and more than 400 arrests in the capital, Paris, last Thursday. Human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International have denounced the “excessive use of force.”