Many questions and still few answers. Sofia Chouviat, the daughter of Cédric Chouviat, who died last January after a police check, spoke on Tuesday 23 June at a press conference to question President Emmanuel Macron. "We still do not understand why [the four police officers] were not suspended, we do not understand why the technique of arrest", a choke key, "has still not been prohibited", he said. she declared before adding: "We are awaiting a solemn response".

The Minister of the Interior, Christophe Castaner, announced the future abandonment of this technique in early June, but it remains authorized pending the definition of an alternative method.

Questioning of methods of arrest

"Behind this throttling key, there is a state of mind, a malaise" of the police, said Doria Chouviat, the victim's wife. "For Cédric, it is too late, but it is a great opportunity for the government to no longer give in to blackmail by the unions and to question" on the methods of arrest and the attitude of the police, a she added during a speech by the family and their lawyers.

For one of them, Me William Bourdon, there is "a paradoxical and perverse effect of the ventral plating": "When you put someone on the ground, he struggles because he suffocates and (...) the police, caught up in the mechanics of the obsession with immobilization, do the opposite of what they should do in an insane manner "and are relentless instead of releasing the pressure.

"I 'm suffocating" : the four police officers say they did not hear

On January 3, Cédric Chouviat, a 42-year-old delivery man on a scooter, had suffered a heart attack near the Eiffel Tower after being tackled to the ground, helmet on his head, by three police officers after a check-up stretched road, filmed by a fourth police officer.

Transported in critical condition to the hospital, he died on January 5 of asphyxia "with fracture of the larynx", according to the first elements of the autopsy communicated by the parquet floor of Paris, which had opened a judicial investigation for "manslaughter".

According to a forensic report dated April 21, Cédric Chouviat repeated seven times "stop", "I stop", then "I suffocate" in about twenty seconds when it was brought down by the police.

The four police officers implicated "did not hear" it repeat "I suffocate" at the time of his arrest, said their lawyers on Tuesday. "When the IGPN investigators confronted them with this recording", on Wednesday in police custody, "the police were all surprised and devastated, because if they had heard these words, obviously they would have stopped fighting immediately" , continued Mr. Thibault de Montbrial, lawyer for two of them.

He believes that these words are audible in the expert's report of April 21 because they were "recorded by the headset" of the delivery man. He "had the microphone close to his mouth," he says.

The expertise, revealed Monday by Le Monde and Mediapart and of which AFP was aware, "supports the hypothesis" of the use of a headset by Cédric Chouviat without being able to "certify it". Judicial information is open for "manslaughter". The four police officers were summoned in early July by the investigating magistrate.

With AFP

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