2023-05-14 01:38:00
CFive people were injured by bullets, including three seriously on Saturday in Villerupt, a small town near the Luxembourg border haunted by drug trafficking, by a shooter who has been identified, we learned from the authorities.
At the start of the evening, a hooded man opened fire in this town of Meurthe-et-Moselle before fleeing in a vehicle.
“There are five victims, four men and a woman. Three people are seriously injured, with two vital prognoses involved. Among the injured, there is a minor, and the oldest is in his thirties”, declared to the AFP the prosecutor of the Republic of Val-de-Briey, Catherine Galen.
“There is an identified shooter, who carried out numerous shots on the spot, numerous casings were found”, she added, without specifying the nature of the firearm used, “in the course of identification”.
A security perimeter was erected at the foot of a six-storey building. On the ground, some traces of blood are visible, while the scientific police were still taking evidence at the end of the evening, placed in kraft envelopes. Cans or even a camping chair were thus recovered, noted an AFP journalist.
A flagrant investigation was opened, entrusted to the DTPJ of Metz (Territorial Directorate of the Judicial Police, formerly DRPJ). The Val-de-Briey public prosecutor’s office, not competent for this type of facts, should relinquish the investigation in favor of the Nancy public prosecutor’s office.
“There was only one scene of shootings, there is nothing in Audun-le-Tiche”, she attested, while some local authorities had previously announced that shootings had also taken place. place in this neighboring town, on the other side of the boundary of the department, in Moselle.
Asked, the elected officials of Villerupt expressed their emotion, while ensuring that they had long demanded additional police resources to deal with the traffic of all kinds which gnaws at this town of 10,000 inhabitants located less than 10 kilometers from the Luxembourg border, and about twenty kilometers from Belgium.
“I am shocked, this is not what we want to see in our town. I am thinking of the families, I hope that tomorrow they will not have to bury their children,” the mayor of Villerupt told AFP. Pierre Spizack.
-“The state is abandoning us”-
According to him, the shooting took place “at the place of a point of deal”, and suggests “a settling of accounts”. “I’m not saying that the injured are traffickers, maybe it was just friends talking. But we’ve been alerting to the situation for some time, we are helpless, and today we find ourselves with three seriously injured,” he said.
“There are petty traffickers, bigger traffickers, sleep traders, prostitution… These are issues linked in particular to borders, it’s easy to go from one side to the other, and we “We have few police officers. They do what they can with the means they have, but the state is abandoning us,” he lamented.
The elected official spontaneously mentioned the visit to the town in March 2021 by the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin. “Since then, the situation has worsened regarding the police station”, Judge Pierre Spizak. “We have 79 agents excluding administrative staff, whereas two years ago the Ministry of the Interior had to increase the number of staff to 104, which makes a differential of 25 agents”, he counted, fearing that the next major sporting events organized in France (Rugby World Cup, Olympic Games) reduce the local national police force.
According to Pierre Spizak, the ministerial visit made it possible to keep the commune’s police station open. “But sometimes there’s only one person inside,” he said. “We currently have between 11,000 and 12,000 complaints that are not processed, for lack of resources. What can we do? A new ministerial visit?”.
The mayor nevertheless praised the work carried out locally by police officers, as well as by street mediators.
“But what happened today, unfortunately, is something we warned about two or three weeks ago,” he concluded. “We said + be careful, it’s going up, we could have deaths +. It’s dramatic”.
05/14/2023 01:36:50 – Villerupt (France) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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