five bullets and counting?
What’s the life worth of a 28-year-old driver from the “Traveller community”, as the press modestly calls him, when he tries with dignity to escape a police checkpoint behind the wheel of his vehicle? Five bullets were fired by the gendarmes, one of which pierced the headrest and exploded his young skull. It happened in the northern suburbs of Toulouse on Thursday July 25, shortly after 10pm, in Fenouillet. His name was Maïky and he came from the Ginestous camp, just a stone’s throw away.
Before Maïky was pronounced dead during the night, almost 200 people immediately turned out in front of the Purpan hospital, in particular to find out whether he had any chance of survival, and to wait for his partner and their month-old daughter, who were with him in the car, to be discharged. Not content with committing yet another murder, the uniforms gathered in front of the hospital fired tear gas at the family, in an attempt to contain the rising anger once the fatal outcome was known. But vengeance can also be a dish best served hot, and there’s no shortage of targets: on the night of Thursday to Friday July 26, the cement manufacturer Lafarge, whose site is close to the Ginestous camp, was attacked: four mixer trucks were set on fire in a matter of minutes.
All day the following day, the small crowd in front of the hospital refused to give up, demanding that Maïky’s body be returned to them so that he could be laid to rest as soon as possible. This was done after an straight-forward autopsy of a gendarme shooting him in the head, while a reconstruction of the execution was carried out with the two gendarmes-shooters, before they were released from police custody without being referred to an examining magistrate by the public prosecutor’s office, as this would have had the disadvantage of giving relatives access to the case file. The prosecutor hoped that these relatives would eventually calm down ahead of the funeral scheduled for Monday July 29.
“It’s a job well done”, he might even have thought from the comfort of his armchair, before heading home to watch the day’s Olympic results, such as the mixed team rifle shooting. The next morning, however, he was faced with the terse headline of a major regional daily: “Deadly refusal to comply: fires and urban violence in Toulouse, millions of euros worth of damage”. For the Lafarge trucks were just a foretaste of a vengeance that had no reason to run out so quickly.
Fenouillet, night of July 26 to 27: fire on the premises of electronic components manufacturer CSI (Cimulec group)
On the night of July 26 to Saturday July 27, while TGV traffic was still largely disrupted across much of France, a boss and his 60 employees were left with nothing but tears in their eyes. Shortly after midnight, the 1,800 m² warehouse of CSI Sud-Ouest became a vast inferno, which is no small feat when you consider that the company’s activity was more harmful than anything else: the production of electronic components for the Cimulec group, which describes itself as “one of Europe’s leading manufacturers of highly reliable printed circuits for harsh environments (defense, space, aeronautics, nuclear, rail, etc.)”.
And given that this charming company was located precisely in Fenouillet, in the area of Maïky’s police murder and not far from the Ginestous camp, the public prosecutor had no hesitation in entrusting the investigation to the Division de la criminalité organisée et spécialisée (DCOS). Especially as the firefighters had their work cut out trying to extinguish the blaze, since a hundred people with masked faces were waiting for them behind barricades, and the cops who came to reinforce them were subjected to a barrage of stones and mortar fire. Having reached the end of their tether, the firefighters found that the fire was now “generalized”, and the damage to CSI Sud-Ouest is now estimated at several million euros.
Fenouillet, night of July 26-27: fire on Toulouse-Métropole premises and eight vehicles
But why stop there, once the first reflex is not to seek justice from those responsible for the death of a loved one, but to let loose all one’s rage against a world that generates gendarmes and prosecutors? Right next door to the now-defunct CSI Sud-Ouest is a Toulouse Métropole building, which logically met the same fate: a hundred-square-meter building belonging to the agglomeration and eight of its utility vehicles were consumed by flames in the course of the same night. The mayor of Toulouse (and president of the Métropole) was more moved by the arson than by the five gendarmerie bullets fired at the recalcitrant driver, with Jean-Luc Moudenc immediately calling on “the State to take all necessary measures to find those responsible and severely punish these acts.”
Three days after Maïky’s death, no one can speak for the unidentified individuals who set fire to Fenouillet. But everyone can learn something from it: in the face of police murders, a whole world remains to be demolished, and it’s often closer than we think…
[Synthesis of the regional press (La Dépêche & France3), July 29, 2024]
via: sansnom
Translated by Act for freedom now!
