A man armed with a knife was shot dead by the police on Wednesday according to a police source, which specifies that the attacker, “threatening”, had rushed on the police, without causing any injuries.
The facts occurred around 1 p.m. in a store in the commercial area of La Valentine (11th arrondissement), in the east of the city, where the police had been called after this fifty-year-old unknown to justice had been spotted. with a butcher’s knife.
The store was then evacuated and a security guard attempted to calm down. But “the man didn’t want to hear anything, retorting “to be fed up with this world”, “to have made his decision a long time ago and to regret that Putin [le président russe, ndlr] didn’t do the job.” reported the Marseille prosecutor, Dominique Laurens, during a press briefing.
The police summoned the man “several times to lay down his weapon”, specified the prosecutor of the Republic of Marseille, Dominique Laurens, in a brief press release, before a press briefing announced at the end of the afternoon: but he “refused to comply and rushed towards the police who then used their weapon twice”, added the magistrate. No injuries are to be deplored, apart from the perpetrator of the attack, who died quickly from his injuries despite the intervention of the firefighters. A psychological aid system has been set up by the police headquarters for the witnesses present on the spot.
“When they arrived in the store, the police ordered the individual to drop his weapon but he violently rushed at them pointing the knife in their direction, overturning the shelves as he passed. Two of the three policemen fired on him five times with their service weapons,” she continued. Hit in the shoulder and chest, the man died on the spot despite the intervention of firefighters.
“The hypothesis of a terrorist act has already been ruled out, the man having never sought to claim his action”, added the prosecutor, favoring the track of a “suicide by proxy” : the facts make “really think about it”, “things that happen in the world must have repercussions in the psyche of some people”.
“Thank you to the brave police officers who neutralized a threatening individual, armed with a knife, in a commercial area in Marseille. The assailant died. No other injured, tweeted the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin.
Thank you to the gendarmes and the police for their effective action in the face of the dangerous phenomenon of #UrbanRodeos.
Several hundred people have been fined and several vehicles have been seized in recent days.?
— Gérald DARMANIN (@GDarmanin) May 11, 2022
Two separate investigations were immediately opened to determine the exact circumstances of the facts, specified the Marseille prosecutor: a first, entrusted to the judicial police, to “attempted homicide on a person holding public authority”, from the aggressor; and a second, entrusted to the IGPN, for “voluntary homicide”, to “to determine the conditions of the shots” from law enforcement. The police force is indeed systematically seized when a police officer uses his service weapon. The scene, “of a very very great violence”, was nevertheless filmed in its entirety by a witness. And “the images already make it possible to confirm the concordant versions of the witnesses and the police officers responsible for the shots”, added Dominique Laurens.
The day before, a man was seriously injured in a knife attack in front of a college in the city of Bouches-du-Rhône, but the terrorist hypothesis has been definitively ruled out by the investigators, according to whom the aggressor, arrested, apparently suffers of psychological disorders.
Update : addition this Wednesday at 5:55 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. of information on the suspect and the investigations opened.