The prosecutor's office in Marseille, France, said that four police officers will be brought before a judge for indictment, after they shot 22-year-old Hadi earlier this month, severely beating him and leaving him on the side of the road fighting death.
While many denounced the warm applause of these officers' colleagues in support of them, calling the welcome a "heinous act", it seemed like an inexplicable sense of impunity that invaded the police profession.
The French website Mediapart – in a report – quoted the young victim Hadi, saying with his head covered with bandages: The police officers "shot me and beat me and then left me to fight death on the ground."
The National Police Department arrested eight officers from two different battalions of the Anti-Crime Police two weeks after the incident, but the Marseille Prosecutor's Office indicated that four of these officials would be brought before the investigating judge for indictment, and he requested their placement in pre-trial detention.
Brutal scene
The Public Prosecutor's Office in Marseille opened a judicial investigation into "mass violence by persons exercising public power," and Hadi's mother, Leila, expressed her happiness with the arrest of this group, and said – according to the Mediapart report – "The matter is moving in the right direction, I think they have data thanks to the cameras, we trust justice."
Jacques Antoine Briziossi, the young man's lawyer, described what happened as a "scene of brutality", where five or six crazy people beat and assaulted two of the boys, pointing out that they are government employees in the French state, and added, "We are waiting for the investigation and justice to be done, and to identify and prosecute these people."
Bullets and dragging
Hadi said he left the restaurant alone by car to Marseille to join some comrades in the old port, met his girlfriend and continued walking together, but at one of the intersections they met men from the anti-crime squad. "I remember their batons and their service weapon. We told them good evening, but we soon understood that they were angry," according to Hadi, the police did not return the greeting, but grabbed him while his girlfriend managed to escape.
Hadi says he saw a policeman shoot him in the head, then dragged him to the ground about 10 meters, then one of the men knelt on his legs to immobilize him while the others beat him. "I remember the stick with blood running down my face from a wound on my head," he says, recalling that it lasted five minutes, begging the police to stop: "I was screaming that I was cute, that I had my papers, that they could search me to see that I didn't have anything serious, but they didn't want to stop."
🇨🇵 FLASH – À Marseille, Hedi, un Maghrébin qui sortait du travail s'est fait tirer dessus au LBD. Roué de coups et laissé pour mort par des membres de la BAC.
Déférés pour « violences en réunion », les policiers sont sortis de l'IGPN sous les applaudissements de leurs collègues. pic.twitter.com/bnpL697FTs
— Tajmaât (@Tajmaat_Service) July 20, 2023
After the policemen left him, Hadi tried to get up and run but collapsed. He tried to call his girlfriend, who took him and the two grocery owners to the hospital, and his parents were only informed the next day when the gendarmerie asked them to call the police and told them "it's very dangerous." "When we called them, they told us he was in a hospital after he was shot in the head. They asked us to come as soon as possible."
The parents describe how their son's vision was delayed in hospital, and how doctors said his survival was miraculous. Doctors had to remove part of his skull to drain the blood between the brain and the skull, with a broken jaw and a swollen left eye that could hardly restore vision.
Celebrating the suspects
In another report, Mediapart spoke about the scene of police officers clapping and celebrating their friends suspected of committing acts of violence against the boy Hadi, in a scene that the site described as a applause of shame similar to spitting in the face of the victim, and represents their growing sense of impunity.
How can it be understood that police officers, who should set a good example, dare to show such support? How does this sense of impunity increasingly invade the profession? He pointed to the habit of the police questioning the accounts of victims and criminalizing them.
"We won't let you go," the report said, adding that a political class supported views that the victim Nael had to stop to avoid dying.
Loss of control
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin is outraged by talk of police violence, and the Paris police chief repeats that there is no "racism" in the police and refuses to condemn the fundraising of the policeman who killed Nael.
The Mediapart report revealed that officers' defiance of justice in front of the police building and their support for their colleagues seemed "authorized", asking: "In any profession – other than police – people support their colleagues in this way, can we imagine providing such explicit support to caregivers suspected of beating elderly people in nursing homes or to teachers who left students to die?"
The report concluded that this scene shows that control of the police profession is gradually being lost, although all investigations have highlighted the systematic racism and violence of the police.