The Paris prosecutor’s office on Monday requested the dismissal of 13 teenagers on trial, including six for an “attempted murder” on young Yuriy who had aroused a national stir in mid-January 2021 amid suspicions of “gang war”, a AFP learned on Friday from a source familiar with the matter. In detail, the public prosecutor requests the trial before the Assize Court of Paris minors of seven minors aged 16 to 17 at the time of the facts and two adults.
The prosecution is also asking that four other minors aged 14 to 15 at the time of this attack appear before the juvenile court ruling in criminal matters. The final decision on referrals to trial rests with the investigating judge.
None of the defendants has ever been convicted.
None of these defendants, presumed innocent, has ever been convicted by the courts, according to the requisitions of the prosecution of which AFP has knowledge. The vast majority of them are described as having had uneventful adolescence, close-knit families and no criminal history.
Yuriy, a schoolboy who was about to turn 15, born in Ukraine in 2006, was taken to hospital in serious condition after being beaten up on the evening of January 15, 2021, while he was with friends on the Beaugrenelle slab, the fitted roof of a shopping center in the capital’s 15th arrondissement. His attack, documented on a video, had been widely attributed to a settling of scores between rival gangs against a backdrop of provocations on social networks.
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The broadcast on these networks on January 22 of around twenty seconds of images of his attack had aroused many reactions, both from President Emmanuel Macron and from footballer Antoine Griezmann. In its requisitions, the prosecution indicates that these facts are part of “an exacerbated conflict between young people residing in Vanves in the Hauts-de-Seine and others residing in the 15th arrondissement who are part of a group nicknamed ‘RD4’ “, related to Yuriy.
“The grouping” of the first, “previously equipped with knives, hammers, replicas of handguns and who staged themselves by posting photographs on social networks, can only be analyzed as a desire to commit violence and to take revenge” writes the head of the minors section of the Paris prosecutor’s office. Many of the respondents conceded that they moved to the slab in retaliation, without intention to kill, for the violence suffered by another minor, half-brother of one of the respondents, in the same place on 10 January.
If Yuriy was present during this first attack, he is not indicted in the separate judicial information on these facts, a judicial source told AFP.