A 16-year-old teenager was killed and four men, including three young people, injured on Saturday night in a working-class district of Bordeaux, during an automatic gun shooting that could be linked to inter-city rivalries, a worrying mark according to the town hall of a local “escalation” of armed crime.
At around 10.50 p.m., a group of young people who were in a small plot in the heart of Aubiers, a city of about 3,500 inhabitants north of Bordeaux, was the target of bursts of automatic weapon fire from a vehicle passing at their height. , said the prosecution in a statement.
After the area was secured by the police, firefighters rescued a seriously injured 16-year-old boy, who died shortly after at Bordeaux University Hospital. Three teenagers aged 13 to 16 and a 35-year-old man, also injured, managed to escape by entering a building.
The teenagers were hospitalized at the CHU, one of them suffering from a bullet under the heart, but whose days would not be in danger, another hit in the biceps and the scapula, a third in the knee. The 35-year-old man with an injured calf later presented to a clinic.
“We were very, very scared,” Habib, an inhabitant of the city who saw part of the shooting from his window and described “several passages” in the car of one or more attackers. According to him, among the victims were teenagers running a small makeshift stall where they sold drinks.
According to the prosecution, videos are being used as part of the judicial police investigation and many casings have been discovered – “several dozen” according to Vincent Maurin, deputy mayor of Bordeaux for the district.
– Weapons and determination –
The city was calm Sunday with young people gathered around the buildings, but a latent hostility persisted towards visitors. A Rea photo reporter told AFP that he was briefly attacked by a group, receiving a punch.
The city of Aubiers had been the scene of repeated incidents on New Year’s Eve: bus and tram stops were destroyed, a post office burned down and fireworks and projectiles fired at intervening police officers. The incidents were not injured and, two days later, had not given rise to any arrests.
The district is also associated with sporadic rivalries with young people from two other cities in the north of the city. But the shooting on Saturday, with the appearance of a punitive expedition, “according to the first information, seems” to be linked to such a rivalry, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The prosecution evokes a shooting as part of “an escalation of tensions observed between neighborhoods for several weeks, without at this time any element allowing these elements to be linked together”.
The mayor (EELV) of Bordeaux Pierre Hurmic, alongside elected officials Sunday morning at the town hall of the district encompassing the Aubiers, told journalists of his concern at the “escalation for some time in organized crime with heavy weapons “, while Bordeaux” has long been sheltered from the phenomena of serious delinquency “.
His Security Assistant Amine Smihi considered two aspects “very worrying”: that “weapons of quasi-automatic caliber and nature circulate at this level in the population” and “the degree of determination concerned: people who were not come to parade, boast or challenge, but obviously with the intention of killing “. Lately, “our social actors tell us that the tension is mounting,” he noted.
“A new course has been crossed, which goes beyond the social containment structures of the neighborhoods,” said Mr. Maurin, who told AFP not to “recognize” the city where he lived in the 1980s. However, ” positive things are happening “in Aubiers, a priority district, the object of a vast urban renewal project, and which is preparing events for its 50th anniversary (it dates from 1970). “A part of the population has always been involved, but today they are afraid,” laments the elected official.
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