The investigation opened for “manslaughter” after the death of three Algerian migrants hit by a train in October in Ciboure, in the Basque Country, was dismissed, said Thursday the Bayonne prosecutor’s office.
They had been caught by a TER on October 12 at 5:00 a.m., a few kilometers after crossing the Franco-Spanish border, while they were following the railway on foot in order to escape possible police checks. A fourth migrant was seriously injured.
Complaint against X filed in December
The survivor, like the relatives of two of the dead and three national associations for the aid of exiles, had filed a complaint against X in December. They accused a fifth man, present at the time, of having put “harmful substances” in the drinks of the victims.
But the toxicological analyzes carried out on the bodies of the deceased and the injured did not establish the ingestion of toxic or harmful products, indicated the prosecutor Jérôme Bourrier, confirming information from BFM TV.
“No element of the criminal investigation points to poisoning,” he said.
The “smuggler” known to the police
That morning, these men would have lay down on the rails to rest from their night walk, shortly before the Saint-Jean-de-Luz station (Pyrénées-Atlantiques). They would not have heard the TER arriving from Hendaye.
The fifth man, whom the survivor describes as their “smuggler”, had fled before being arrested two days after the accident in Bayonne. Known to the services for a burglary for which he had been tried a few months earlier, he was ultimately not worried.
Migrants, mainly from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, are taking more and more risks to enter France by bypassing controls at the Franco-Spanish border. Since last year, four of them have drowned trying to cross the Bidassoa, the river that marks this border in the Basque Country.