Paris (AFP)
The latest medical expertise in the investigation into the death of Adama Traoré, a young 24-year-old black man who died in 2016 during an arrest, once again dismisses responsibility for the technique of arresting the gendarmes in his death, a AFP learned from a source close to the file on Friday.
"Adama Traoré did not die from positional suffocation +, but from cardiogenic edema", conclude the doctors. Their expertise had been ordered by the investigating judges responsible for this sensitive case, which had become a symbol of police violence, after a medical report produced at the request of the family had swept away the conclusions of the investigation.
On July 19, 2016, the young man died in the barracks of the Persian gendarmes, almost two hours after his arrest in his city of Beaumont-sur-Oise (Val-d'Oise) and at the end of a chase , after having escaped a first arrest on a hot day.
Adama Traoré "took the weight of the three of us" when he was arrested in the house where he was hiding, said one of the gendarmes during an interrogation, raising questions about the method used.
Three gendarmes who carried out the arrest were placed under the intermediary status of assisted witnesses and since then, the defense and the family have fought a legal but also a medical battle.
"We do not find any obvious pathology explaining this cardiogenic edema," add the expert doctors. "Nevertheless the combination of pulmonary sarcoidosis (rare pathology, editor's note), hypertrophic heart disease and a sickle cell trait (genetic disease, editor's note) could probably have contributed to it in a context of intense stress and effort physical, under high concentration of tetrahydrocannabinol ", the active ingredient in cannabis.
Previously, a summary report given to the judges on September 14, 2018 concluded that "the vital prognosis (was) committed irreversibly" before the arrest.
The judges were preparing to dismiss the case, when the family had relaunched the investigations by adding to the file a report from doctors, including a sickle cell specialist, who attributed the death to "an acute asphyxia syndrome" and invited to " ask the question of positional or mechanical asphyxiation ", in other words a questioning of the technique of arresting the gendarmes.
"This is only the third expertise which confirms the absence of any responsibility on the part of the gendarmes," replied Me Rodolphe Bosselut, lawyer for the gendarmes.
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