In France, a hitman at 14

Photo: Clément Mahoudeau Agence France-Presse A general view shows 49 silhouettes cut out on the steps of the Marseille courthouse in memory of the 49 drug-related violence and deaths in 2023, on September 14, 2024.

Last month, the body of a young man from Saint-Léonard was discovered in Frampton, 75 kilometers from Quebec City, near a Dark Souls hideout. The young man of Algerian origin, Mohamed-Yanis Seghouani, is suspected of having been murdered after trying to set fire to the premises of this Hells Angels training club as part of a gang war for control of drug trafficking. But it was the victim's age that stunned everyone: he was barely 14 years old.

Quebec is far from the only place affected by this new early-onset crime. A week after Frampton’s gruesome discovery, a 14-year-old boy killed a taxi driver in Marseille with a .357 Magnum. The driver had refused to comply with his orders as the teenager was on his way to commit another murder in exchange for 50,000 euros (75,525 Canadian dollars). A few days later, the Marseille public prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone, revealed that this contract had been ordered by a prisoner from an isolation unit in Luynes prison.

“Today, we have hitmen aged 14, 15 or 16 who are recruited on social networks by thugs who are often abroad, in hiding or in prison and who pay them to carry out their score-settling,” explains Jean-Michel Décugis. For the senior police and justice reporter for the daily newspaper Le Parisien, this is an entirely new phenomenon that has appeared in France in the last two or three years.

“We give them a weapon, a photo, a GPS and they go and kill people they don't know. They don't know who ordered them either. So we have young people from the Paris region who cross France to kill people in Marseille, and people from Marseille who go and kill others in the Lyon region. »

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The “Uberization” of Crime

In his latest book, Hitmen. Investigation into the new phenomenon of shooters (Flammarion), co-written with his colleagues Jérémie Pham-Lê and Vincent Gautronneau, Jean-Michel Décugis lifts the veil on this metamorphosis of drug trafficking that recruits increasingly younger little hands. A phenomenon that he describes as the “Uberization” of drug trafficking. Recently, a report from the Court of Auditors revealed the remuneration of these artisans of drug trafficking often recruited on the Internet: 300 euros ($450) per day for a seller, 150 ($227) for a lookout, 1500 ($2267) per month for a “nanny” who keeps the drugs at his home.

“It was COVID that changed everything,” says Décugis. “During the epidemic, travel was impossible or very difficult. Traffickers then used social networks to continue to grow their businesses. They began to recruit increasingly younger intermediaries who served as lookouts, sellers and now hitmen. It’s an entirely new phenomenon.”

This new model is modeled on that of the sicarios, these young people recruited in the Mexican favelas to kill the bosses of rival clans. Except, says Décugis, that we are no longer dealing with thugs killing each other, but with completely inexperienced young people, often unknown to the police and for whom this is sometimes their first feat of arms.

This would explain in particular the many “stray bullets” that France has experienced recently. In Nîmes, in August 2023, a 10-year-old child was killed by a bullet in the back of his uncle’s car, who had nothing to do with it. The killers had simply gotten into the wrong car. A few weeks later, a Kalashnikov bullet went through the wall of a building in the Saint-Thys housing estate in Marseille and mowed down Socayna, a 24-year-old law student who was revising for her lessons in her room on the third floor. The perpetrator was none other than a 15-year-old who had fired a burst of gunfire into the building to spread terror. Just last weekend, near Rennes, a 5-year-old child was shot in the back of a car instead of his father, who was linked to drug trafficking.

In his book, Jean-Michel Décugis tells the story of Mattéo. Arrested in a three-story house with a swimming pool, this frail teenager, who had grown up in a wealthy environment but without a father, became the designated killer of the DZ Mafia, one of the main drug cartels in the south of France. He is now under investigation for six murders, including those of two teenagers in Joliette, near the old port of Marseille. The killer did not hesitate to put himself in the picture in videos that he posted on social networks to prove to his sponsors that the contract had been carried out. Videos to which he even added a musical touch.

« Completely in the virtual »

Questioned by the Senate inquiry committee on drug trafficking, several magistrates from the city of Marseille did not hesitate to speak of a “Mexicanization” of France. An observation confirmed by a delegation of Mexican magistrates who visited France last May. In Marseille, the drug trafficking points in a neighborhood like Castellane are said to bring in 140,000 euros per day today, according to Décugis. As for homicides and attempted homicides linked to drug trafficking, they increased by 35% in 2023.

“We went from ‘hitting is serious’ to ‘hitting is not serious’, then to ‘killing is not serious’. […] “Anyway, he would have died one day or another,” minors tell us. So killing would only consist of accelerating a natural process. These young people feel no guilt. “This is what the child psychiatrist Maurice Berger told us last year. He created the first hospital center in Saint-Étienne in 1979 dedicated to children who descend into extreme violence.

The same goes for Jean-Michel Décugis, who also notes that all the young murderers listed in his book grew up without a father. “Today you have totally unstructured kids who live in the fantasy of television series on drug trafficking. They are completely in the virtual world and have a feeling of heroization of their belonging to a criminal group that functions a bit like a sect. We have the impression that they are shooting at targets as if they were fairground targets. It is a bit like the same mechanism as jihadism, which exploits kids through social networks from Syria. There is a very strong feeling of belonging among these young people who fantasize about themselves as warriors, which gives them a reason to be, because for them life no longer has any importance. Including their own. »

Immediate punishments ?

For years, Maurice Berger has been advocating that this crime be punished without delay, as is done in the Netherlands, where 27 prisons were recently closed. This would involve quasi-automatic sentences so that the young person immediately realizes the seriousness of his act instead of settling into a form of impunity. Today, sanctions are constantly postponed, if not eliminated, until the offender commits a very serious crime.

This is also the opinion of Jean-Michel Décugis. “What we need is to be able to punish these kids from their first acts. In France, there is a very long delay between the time when the person commits the crime, when they are sentenced and when their sentence is applied. Sometimes, it is never applied. For example, we need immediate appearances for minors within 48 hours as we do for adults.”

In the meantime, the journalist notes that the more time passes, the more we are dealing with children of traffickers. “These are criminal families who no longer obey the codes of our society. They have their own language and their own rules. It is very difficult even to have a dialogue with them…”