2024-01-09 06:45:06
Théodore Luhaka in front of the Bobigny courthouse, October 28, 2017. GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT/AFP
A year of investigation into the facts, two and a half years of medical expertise, appeals, requests for delays, the crisis linked to Covid-19: it took almost seven years for the “Théo affair” to be judged “, symbolic of the tense relations between the police and young residents of poor neighborhoods, and revealing of the methods of certain police officers on which the courts will have to rule – rarely at ease when the accused are precisely those whom it needed for its investigations.
Tuesday January 9 opens, in Bobigny, before the Assize Court of Seine-Saint-Denis, the trial for “aggravated willful violence” of three police officers accused of having committed several brutal acts on Théodore Luhaka, 22 years old at at the time, during an identity check that went wrong, on February 2, 2017 in Aulnay-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis). The scene, captured by the city’s video surveillance cameras, lasts eight minutes.
We see four men in uniform – one of them will be exonerated – coming to meet a group of young people at the foot of a building. One minute after the start of the check, which takes place off camera, the situation escalates. Police officers and young people reappear in the camera’s field, the first focusing on one individual – Théo – while the rest of the group disperses in confusion. Struggling with the officers, the young man struggles, loses his jacket, finds himself on the ground, receives blows and tear gas, before being picked up and blocked against a low wall by the police, who struggle to handcuff him.
Also read the investigation (2020): Article reserved for our subscribers Théo affair: the relentless demonstration of a serious series of police failings
It is then that agent Marc-Antoine Castelain, who is behind Théo, thrusts him in the buttocks with the tip of his baton, which causes a rupture of the anal sphincter. The young man collapsed to the ground, where he continued to receive blows. When he arrived at the Aulnay-sous-Bois police station, he had significant bleeding from his buttocks and was immediately sent to hospital. When we ask him, the next day, to rate the intensity of the pain felt at the time, from 1 to 10, Théo will answer « dix ». The affair led to several days of demonstrations and riots. The President of the Republic at the time, François Hollande, went to the hospital to the bedside of the young man, who took Eric Dupond-Moretti as his lawyer before the latter, having become Minister of Justice, handed over the place for his partner, Antoine Vey.
Lively exchanges to be expected
Two contentious phases of this arrest will be judged in Bobigny: the baton blow which led to the serious injury from which Théo suffered, on the one hand; the violent actions committed afterwards, while the young man, fallen to the ground and subdued by the police, was no longer moving, on the other hand.
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