“We are losing the war. » Before the Senate commission of inquiry into drug trafficking, Marseille magistrates, on Tuesday March 5, drew up a very worrying inventory of the impact of the drug networks which are plaguing France’s second largest city, to the point of evoking the term of “narcoville”. The explosion, in 2023, in the number of assassinations and attempts linked to narcotics, with around fifty deaths and 123 injured, illustrates, according to Olivier Leurent, president of the judicial tribunal, how “the war is asymmetrical between the State, in a vulnerable situation, and traffickers who have considerable leverage in terms of financial, human, technological and even legislative means”.
If drug trafficking is not the prerogative of Marseille, the city is, in the eyes of magistrates, “the epicenter, where it manifests itself in its most violent expression and damages the social fabric day after day”. Publicly, these discreet actors of justice revealed what is whispered in the corridors of the courthouse. With increasingly young methods of recruiting killers, via social networks, the risks to the own safety of magistrates have increased.
When, two years ago, he questioned the judges on the front line against drug trafficking, Olivier Leurent was told that no risk was felt. This is no longer the case today and, adds the magistrate, “in Marseille, no one has forgotten the emblematic figure of Pierre Michel”, investigating judge assassinated in October 1981 by a young team of heroin traffickers. Mr. Leurent therefore calls for “a “Marshall Plan” for the fight against drug trafficking, like the commitment against domestic violence, because our rule of law and republican stability are at stake”.
Advocacy for a “very harsh prison regime”
In this war, one battle already seems lost, that of the prison, where drugs and cell phones enter in large numbers. “Detention has become a real problem because it no longer puts an end to the activities of network heads, deplores Isabelle Fort, head of the organized crime division of the Marseille public prosecutor’s office. Even with ten criminal committal warrants, they continue to sponsor assassinations or manage their deal points as if they were on the outside. » Recently, the sound system of a cell allowed the recording of the order to commit an assassination.
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