There are hundreds of testimonials on social networks and in the press. The phenomenon of “evening injections” has taken on a national dimension with the multiplication of stories and complaints lodged throughout France for several months.
The scenario is always the same: people who claim to have noticed bite marks on their leg, arm or neck during a concert, a festival, an evening in a bar or in a discotheque. Then dizziness, nausea, discomfort for some; nothing for others, but still a lot of worry.
Rima Abdul-Malak, Minister of Culture, calling for the avoidance of “psychosis”, said Tuesday, June 21 on France Inter:
« This still remains an enigma, this story of bites, since there is neither contamination nor products that are sampled, nor aggression at the end of these bites. But they really do exist. »
Update on what we know about this phenomenon, several months after the first testimonies.
More than 800 complaints all over France
Cases of bites occurring during festive moments have been reported in Lille, Béziers, Nantes, Rennes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Nancy, Lyon, Bastia, Besançon, Valence or Toulouse. Very recently, cases have also been highlighted at Hellfest, one of the most important music festivals in France, organized in Clisson, in Loire-Atlantique. Other victims reported themselves on Tuesday evening, during the music festival, as in Roanne, in the Loire. Even the inhabitants of Pexiora (Aude), were confronted with the phenomenon during the festival of this small village of 1,256 inhabitants.
More than 800 complaints have been filed in France and 1,098 testimonies have been recorded as of June 16, said the General Directorate of the National Police (DGPN).
A summary note from the DGPN dated June 7 and consulted by Agence France-Presse (AFP) mentions ” a way operator » making no distinction between men and women. The puncture marks are located on ” arms “, “buttocks”, « the two »without the victims seeing their attacker.
This note describes immediate effects” but also “delayed effects”sometimes with “bruise marks” around the red point characterizing the bite. Symptoms are varied and range ” headaches “ to “hot flashes” passing through “dizziness” even a ” loss of consciousness “.
Negative toxic substance searches
The Anti-Narcotics Office (Ofast) has been in charge, for several weeks, of centralizing “the number of facts and the qualitative elements”. If investigations were to bring to light organized trafficking, the office would seize the specialized interregional jurisdictions concerned.
For the moment, however, no convincing element has been brought to light by the investigators to explain the phenomenon. “When acts are reported, samples are taken as a priority” even before filing a complaint, according to the DGPN.
So far, analyzes have not revealed “no trace of GHB”dubbed the “date-rape drug”, and the victims did not report acts “of sexual assault or theft following the sting”, assures the DGPN. Toxicological analyzes have sometimes revealed “blood alcohol” or some “traces of cannabis” whose consumption the victim had admitted.
The only case of detection of a potential injected substance took place in Châlons-en-Champagne, in the Marne, where “an examination came back with a trace of common medicine, light anxiolytic type, not consumed by the victim”, according to the floor.
These cases are reminiscent of those that have worried the United Kingdom since the fall, after a wave of testimonies from students who were drugged without their knowledge by injection in nightclubs. In a parliamentary report published at the end of April, British MPs report 1,382 cases recorded between September 2021 and January 2022, but the toxicological analyzes were no more conclusive than in France and no one was charged. The parliamentarians called for strengthening security at the entrance to party venues, strengthening means of screening to better understand the phenomenon and better supporting those who claim to be victims. The report points out that less than a third of them have lodged a complaint.
Three indictments in Toulon
Ongoing investigations have so far resulted in the indictment of three people in two separate cases in Toulon.
The first is a 20-year-old man indicted and placed in pre-trial detention on June 6 as part of a judicial investigation opened after around twenty spectators who attended the recording of a TF1 program on a beach. du Var claimed to have been victims of stings. A security officer who worked on the site was hospitalized. “She suffered from discomfort but we have not yet been able to determine whether this discomfort was linked to a harmful substance introduced into the syringe or to the stressful situation she had just experienced”said the Toulon prosecutor, Samuel Finielz, in early June.
In a second case, concerning a young woman who claimed to have been bitten during an evening in a nightclub in Sanary-sur-Mer (Var), two men were indicted and imprisoned on June 20. The young woman had felt unwell “immediately after the events and in the week that followed”, according to the prosecutor. Medical conditions confirmed by a medical examiner, “which nevertheless suggests that there was an administration of harmful substances”, continued the prosecutor. The results of the toxicological examinations are still awaited.
The victim had denounced two individuals and the exploitation of video surveillance tapes from the nightclub “allowed to identify the actions of two people consistent with what the victim described”, according to the Toulon prosecutor. In the second suspect, investigators found four syringes, two needles and injectable vials containing prescription-only medication.
Conversely, in Orleans, an investigation for “slanderous denunciation” was opened in early June after the complaint of a 19-year-old young woman who claimed to have been stung during an evening at a disco. According to the prosecution, she said she had “felt a sharp burning sensation in the forearm, having weakened to the point of not being able to move and losing consciousness” and she “presented a reddish trace resembling a trace of a bite”. The investigations carried out by the gendarmes and the hearings of the victim, his friends and the bouncers of the discotheque finally “established that the complainant’s allegations were not credible”, according to prosecutor Emmanuelle Bochenek-Puren.
What are the possible explanations?
The search for toxins is complicated by the delays. Some substances, including GHB, disappear from the body within hours. This is why the Dijon University Hospital advises those who think they are victims of a bite “do not urinate before treatment” and of “reach an emergency service as soon as possible”.
Another hypothesis: the substances injected are already naturally present because they are secreted by the human body, such as insulin or adrenaline. They would therefore go unnoticed in the analyses.
It is also possible that nothing was injected into the victims during these injections, often described as very rapid, or even that the latter were not even carried out with syringes.
During the ferias of Nîmes, at the beginning of June, 47 cases were for example identified by the Red Cross. “But that doesn’t mean that 47 people were stung on purpose, even by fools playing scary. It’s just people who believe they have been bitten and who may have been scratched or who have been taken unwell without there being a link with bites ”, explained to Agence France-Presse Mounir Benslima, head of the forensic medicine unit of the university hospital center.
The effects of panic are very real, and they worry the world of the night and that of culture, already weakened by drops in attendance since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.