• Five people are on trial before the Assize Court of Val-d'Oise from this Monday, nearly five years after the death of Adama Traoré and the riots that followed. 

  • Four of them, including Bagui Traoré, appear for attempted murder on the police, the fifth for complicity.

  • At the end of the investigation, however, the criminal nature of the facts had not been retained.

Tensions erupted just hours after the announcement of Adama Traoré's death on July 19, 2016, in the courtyard of the Persian gendarmerie. For three nights, this usually quiet town north of Val-d'Oise and the neighboring town of Beaumont-sur-Oise lived to the rhythm of mortar fire, dustbin fires and arson, especially in a nursery school and at the town hall. Three nights during which the gendarmes, quickly supported by the police, wiped projectiles and - rare in this type of urban riots - gunfire.

If the ammunition was finally revealed to be lead, four men including Bagui Traoré, brother of Adama, aged 29 to 39, appear from this Monday and for three weeks before the Assize Court for attempted murder in gang organized around a person holding public authority and a woman, the former companion of Bagui Traoré, for complicity.

At the end of the investigation, however, the criminal nature of the facts had not been retained, the magistrates preferring to send them back to the criminal court for aggravated violence.

The investigating chamber of the court of appeal finally decided otherwise, considering that the gendarmes and police owed their physical integrity only to their equipment.

Violence or attempted homicide?

“We were not in a context of classic riots, insists Me Caty Richard, who defends 15 gendarmes among the hundred who have joined as a civil party. We're not just talking about mortar fire, but people who have been targeted with lethal weapons. They couldn't know what they were loaded with. During these three evenings of violence, several shooters armed with long weapons fired, from the roof of a building or hidden in thickets, at the police. The situation is so tense that the families of gendarmes living in the barracks are evacuated. And if the injuries are only superficial, post-traumatic stress is strongly anchored. Difficulty sleeping, hypervigilance, anxiety… One of them even left the gendarmerie.

“These accusations are totally outlandish, deplores for his part Me Frank Berton, one of Bagui Traoré's lawyers.

My client has been in pre-trial detention for 4 and a half years, accused of wanting to kill nearly 70 gendarmes even though there are no injuries in this case.

The brother of Adama Traoré has never ceased to deny his involvement, claiming to have remained with his family after the death of his younger brother.

Unlike the three other defendants sent back for attempted murder, no DNA traces were found on the weapons discovered and no images show him wielding them.

But the man was implicated by one of his co-defendants, designating him as the "principal", and various wiretaps refer to his participation in the riots.

The shadow of Adama Traoré

"Bagui Traoré impatiently awaits to be able to finally explain himself because he has the feeling of a relentlessness on him as on his family since the death of his brother", continues Frank Berton.

Proof of this is, in his eyes, the large number of gendarmes on the bench of civil parties even though three of them are implicated in the death of Adama Traoré.

"We must not forget that in this case, the gendarmes were targeted, they were afraid for their lives and that of their colleagues," insists Caty Richard.

This is the whole difficulty of this case: if this trial is not that of the death of the young man, who has become the symbol of the fight against police violence, this tragedy risks being part of these hearings.

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