2023-05-09 19:42:24
Hope has almost completely disappeared. Maria (an assumed first name, which has become customary in this case) no longer believes that justice will one day identify the police officers who, on Saturday December 8, 2018, in a street in downtown Marseille, beat her with kicked and bludgeoned until she fractured her skull, after she was knocked to the ground by an LBD shot in the leg. That day, Maria came home from work, she had not taken part in Act IV of the demonstration of “yellow vests”, one of the most violent of this social crisis.
Three years of investigation culminated, on January 25, 2022, in a second dismissal order, unsuccessful conclusion of a judicial investigation opened against X for “aggravated violence” by three circumstances – “by person holding public authority “, “in a meeting” and “with the use of a weapon” – having resulted in total incapacity for work greater than eight days, facts punishable by ten years in prison and a 150,000 euro fine. For lack of identification of the perpetrators of the violence, the investigating judge Karim Badène closed the file, as he had already done in December 2020, before the investigation was reopened by the Marseille prosecutor’s office in March 2021, following the discovery of a witness of the facts who had not been heard. This hearing did not ultimately move the case. Tracks have however been opened, police officers suspected, questioned, placed under listening. None were implicated.
If Maria seems resigned to a lack of elucidation – “I think they know who it is but we are attacking people who have impunity”, she laments – it is the general prosecutor’s office of the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal which creates the surprise. He refuses to close the investigations, announces Maria to the Monde, and, joining the defense of the young woman, asks that this second order of dismissal issued against X be reversed. During a hearing before the investigating chamber on May 10, the Advocate General should request the resumption of the investigation.
A final check
The public prosecutor’s office seems to want to try everything, especially since the investigating judge did not, in his opinion, go to the end of the investigations. In June 2021, Karim Badène had asked that the investigators of the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN) recover from the urban supervision center (CSU), the place where the images from the city’s surveillance cameras converge, the name of all the police services which had requested him to obtain recordings of December 8, 2018 between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., with the aim of confusing the 47 demonstrators arrested and suspected of violence and degradation.
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