"A 'mechanical Orange' in uniform": two police officers were sentenced on Tuesday to appeal to prison terms for the illegal and violent arrest of an Afghan refugee in Marseille. One was sentenced to three years in prison, two years of which was firm, and the other to 18 months in prison, one of which was firm. The third member of this motorway CRS crew, a young woman, security assistant, was given a six-month suspended prison sentence before the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal.
All three had been brought to trial in early May in Marseille; the first two had been sentenced to four years firm and 18 months firm respectively. Incarcerated after the pronouncement of the sentence, they appeared detained Tuesday before the Aix-en-Provence court of appeal. The two police officers, who were banned from practicing in the police for one, and for three years for the other, were however not detained.
The young man abandoned in a vacant lot
CCTV cameras had filmed the muscular arrest of Jamshed, a 27-year-old Afghan, holder of a residence permit, on April 12 on the Old Port of Marseille. Following this, the young refugee had been abandoned 30 km further in a vacant lot where he claims to have been hit. "I was afraid of losing my life there," Jamshed said on Tuesday with the help of an interpreter, accusing one of the police officers of having beaten him "like a boxer."
In a harsh indictment against the police, Advocate General Thierry Villardo denounced an "arbitrary arrest" for the purpose of "private justice", even referring to a "mechanical Orange" in uniform ". "In this case, how can citizens have confidence in the police?" He launched, before requesting penalties almost equivalent to the first-instance convictions for kidnapping and forcible confinement, forgery and willful violence against two most involved police officers, never convicted before.