“They asked me to come. He said: there are 5,000 euros so I said yes because I needed money. It was just to burn a car. » Charged at the beginning of October, this 19-year-old young man from Marseille admitted having participated in a punitive expedition against a guard at the Aix-Luynes penitentiary center, in Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône). The young man and three accomplices, one night in June 2023, left a city in the northern districts of Marseille and filled a can with gasoline on their way to go, near Aix-en-Provence, to set fire to the agent’s vehicle. , parked in front of his house. “We just had to push him”explained another member of the team, also arrested in October.
At the scene they noticed that they did not have a lighter, so the person who had the gun in hand shot two or three times at the vehicle, believing that it could start a fire. His behavior wakes up the agent and his neighbor. The latter clearly hears one of the hooded men say to the others: “If it comes out, I will shoot!” » On the façade of the house, investigators noticed impacts, which led to the three members of the command being charged with “attempted murder of a person holding public authority.”
This attack on a prison officer, committed in his home, is not an isolated case. On July 25, a guard, also stationed at the Aix-Luynes prison, was followed by a vehicle from the prison. When she parks in front of her house, three hooded men kick and hit her, try to take her cell phone and steal her car keys. At the end of August, five people were identified, including two Luynes inmates in conflict with the supervisor. All are accused of “criminal association” and “gang-organized robbery accompanied or followed by violence.”
“Big area of concern”
The two detainees, alleged instigators of this violence that caused a total work stoppage of ten days, belong, according to an investigator, to the Marseille drug gang, one of them imprisoned for murder and the other for drug trafficking.
More recently, on October 7, at four in the morning, unknown persons set fire to the door of a guard’s house in Baumettes, the Marseille penitentiary center. “The prison environment is exposed to the power of 10 to the violence of drug trafficking, which is increasing and is now expressed outside of places of detention”laments a magistrate, for whom it is “a major cause for concern”.
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