15-year-old stabbed and burned alive in escalating violence in Marseille

Photo: Anne-Christine Poujoulat Archives Agence France-Presse Children play football in the Friche Belle de Mai cultural space, June 30, 2016, in Marseille.

Sandra Laffont – Agence France-Presse

Published at 9:39 am

• Europe

A 15-year-old boy stabbed fifty times and then “burned alive” on Wednesday, a 36-year-old VTC driver, father, “coldly shot” on Friday by a 14-year-old boy: homicides linked to drug traffickers have reached “unprecedented savagery” this week in Marseille in the south of France.

The city's public prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone, highlighted on Sunday “an ultra-rejuvenation” of the perpetrators of these homicides and a victim on Friday “totally outside of any drug trafficking”, considering that “another level” had been crossed.

There is “a total loss of bearings which will mean that young boys will respond to advertisements, not to go and do the grape harvest or even to sell cannabis resin at a drug dealing point, but to go and take the lives of others without any remorse, without any reflection”, insisted the magistrate.

And the “role of social networks is starting to make us question ourselves”, added Mr. Bessone, highlighting the “frightening amateurism” of these young people.

The police and justice system of France's second city thought they had seen it all in 2023 with a record number of deaths (49) and an extreme rejuvenation of the small hands of trafficking, these “jobbers” used as cannon fodder by the heads of networks like the DZ Mafia or Yoda.

This year, however, the conflict has moved from the northern districts to the city center of the Phocaean city, in the 3rd arrondissement, towards Belle de Mai, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Europe. And the DZ Mafia, which had gained the upper hand over Yoda, is now opposed to the “so-called black clan of the Félix Pyat estate, in particular for the takeover of the drug dealing point in the Moulin de Mai estate,” explained the prosecutor.

Most of the 17 narchomicides — a term coined by the Marseille justice system to describe drug-trafficking score-settling — recorded by AFP since January are linked to this war, the magistrate said. And the violence has accelerated this week, with two new deaths.

On Wednesday, a 15-year-old was recruited for 2,000 euros, via social networks, by a 23-year-old man detained near Aix-en-Provence and presenting himself as belonging to the DZ Mafia.

Supposed to have intimidated a competitor by setting fire to the door of his apartment, the teenager was spotted by a gang present at the foot of the building. This was followed by an act of “unprecedented savagery”: “he will be stabbed 50 times and taken to the Fonscolombes estate, where, according to the results of the autopsy, he will be burned alive,” Nicolas Bessone said.

A revenge that kills an innocent

The same prisoner, with a “serious record” but “not known on the radar to be at the top of the pyramid”, then tries to get revenge. He recruits, again on social networks, another young man, aged only 14, to go and kill a member of the “Blacks”, for 50,000 euros this time.

Took to a hotel room, where he is joined by another teenager, still on the run, the would-be killer orders a VTC to go and carry out his contract. “They will ask the driver to drop them off and wait for them, but he clearly “does not comply” and the minor “shoots him with a fatal bullet in the back of the head.”

Nessim Ramdane, “a distinguished 36-year-old footballer who also declared his job as a driver to support his family,” is the first collateral victim of the year, the magistrate emphasizes.

Another paradoxical element of this case: it was the sponsor of this contract himself who called the police, at 17, to denounce the young assassin, who had therefore not fulfilled his mission, allowing his arrest.

In police custody, the minor, placed in a home since he was nine years old with parents detained in drug-related cases, admitted to having shot the driver, explaining that the shot had “gone off accidentally”. The prosecution requested that he be placed in detention.