Mayor of Givors insulted and threatened: a suspect arrested

A man suspected of being the author of an anonymous letter which dealt with the mayor of Givors, Mohamed Boudjellaba, as "bougnoule" and threatened him with death, was taken into police custody on Thursday, we learned from parquet.

He will be tried Friday in immediate appearance by the criminal court of Lyon, according to the same source.

"Get the hell out of your way if you don't want to burn like a merguez", "You will have war", "We still know how to use a machine gun", "you know how it looks like a bomb in a house, it's boom ": the letter which Mr. Boudjellaba had published extracts on Twitter in August was particularly hateful and violent towards him.

A complaint had been filed

@ _LICRA_ @ MRAP_Officiel @ EmmanuelMacron @ GDarmanin Being mayor is also that ...

Extracts from 1 letter received yesterday: "Go crazy the camp bougnoule if you do not want to burn like 1 merguez", "we still know how to use '1 submachine gun' pic.twitter.com/7f2hgGjP5O

- Mohamed Boudjellaba (@ CEGivors2020) August 22, 2020

The mayor of Givors, elected at the end of June under the DVG-EELV label in this town of 20,000 inhabitants located between Lyon and Saint-Étienne, had lodged a complaint and received the support of the government.

"Four pages of unsigned repugnance. An investigation is open to find this anonymous and present him to justice," had tweeted the Minister of Justice Eric Dupond-Moretti.

"To attack an elected official is to attack the Republic. Hate has no place in our society," responded the Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin.

It was the intervention of a resident of Givors that made it possible to find the alleged author of the mail.

In December 2018, she had received a similar one and had filed a complaint, which was dismissed six months later.

As soon as she heard about the letter received by the mayor of the city, the thirty-something warned the Givors police station because the two letters contained many common expressions.

"This case confronts us with the expression of ordinary racism"

At the time, she had suspected her upstairs neighbor.

Aged in his sixties, this man had displayed his hostility in a context of conflicting neighborhood, in terms that revealed racism.

The letter received by the inhabitant, signed by "French retirees", alluded to the Bataclan attack and made heavy threats.

"I was very scared, I had to move," says this mother of four today.

Investigators arrested the neighbor, who allegedly admitted the facts.

"This case confronts us with the expression of ordinary racism, it is worrying to see the barriers fall", commented Thursday Me Thomas Fourrey, lawyer acting as civil party for the initial complainant.