Faced once again with the violence of Marseille drug networks, the Bouches-du-Rhône juvenile court pronounced, on Friday September 29, very severe sentences against five young people accused for their role in the kidnapping accompanied by acts of torture and barbarity of two “little hands” traffic.
Just 18 years old at the time of the facts, in November 2020, the accused, who acted as field manager of the deal point from the city of Busserine, in the northern districts of Marseille, was sentenced to twenty-five years of criminal imprisonment. His four co-defendants – three of whom were aged 17 at the time of the facts – received sentences ranging from seven to eighteen years in prison.
Heard during the debates which were held behind closed doors, two victims, a schoolboy, aged 15 at the time, and a 16-year-old teenager had endured an ordeal lasting four days for the first and almost a month for the second. They just wanted to make some money. These two little ones “lookouts” had been cut from the outside, beaten, strangled, stabbed, burned in the face with a lighter or burning sticks, thrown into a campfire. One of them described how the accused rushed at them with a scooter or had fun jumping on his hands until they broke his fingers. Their bodies bore numerous traces of injuries and burns.
One of them had also been raped in a cellar in the city, fellatio had been imposed on him by one of the three accused minors, the one who was sentenced to eighteen years of criminal imprisonment. The young accused always recognized as “a stroke of madness” this rape which he had filmed with a mobile phone and accompanied by the threat of it being broadcast on social networks in the event of denunciation.
Merciless landlady
A sixth accused, a 66-year-old resident of Busserine, was sentenced to eight years in prison. By hosting in her home, at night, the little hands of the network whom she locked in a room, the jurors considered that she had taken her full part in the acts of kidnapping. The court even went beyond the requisitions of five years in prison requested by the attorney general against this merciless landlady, paid by the network 20 euros per night per young person.
A teenager prosecuted for his role in the facts must be tried in November by the Marseille children’s court ruling in criminal matters. He was 15 years old, an age which allowed him to escape the juvenile court.
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