Placed in police custody on Wednesday evening, the 23-year-old policeman who shot a motorist who refused to comply on Wednesday in Nice was indicted for willful violence and placed under judicial supervision, we learned on Friday at the prosecutor’s office. He was indicted for “willful violence with a weapon causing death without intention to give it”, and was banned from carrying a weapon, said the public prosecutor of Nice, Xavier Bonhomme.
In police custody since Wednesday, the police officer, assistant in a road safety brigade, was heard in the context of an open judicial investigation “to determine, in a contradictory manner and under the authority of a judge of instruction, the exact circumstances of the shooting, “said the Nice prosecutor. For its part, the IGPN, the police force, had been charged with an investigation for intentional homicide.
The reaction of the police officer “is clearly disproportionate”
The facts took place on Wednesday around 4:30 p.m., when a 24-year-old man traveling without a license in a stolen vehicle was spotted on the Nice expressway “zigzagging dangerously”, according to management’s explanations. Department of Public Security (DDSP). Refusing to comply with the police beckoning him to stop, the man had accelerated and left the fast lane, before finding himself blocked, turning around and colliding with the police vehicle which was following him. “After several warnings”, the police officer fired “once at the driver of the stolen vehicle”, a version “corroborated by witnesses present at the scene”, Xavier Bonhomme declared on Friday when announcing the opening of judicial information.
A scenario rejected by the relatives of the victim, for whom “it is obvious that we have (case) a homicide, there is no discussion on it”, declared Thursday one of their lawyers, Master Sefen Guez Guez. The policeman’s reaction “is clearly disproportionate”, insisted this lawyer from the Nice bar, co-appointed with Maître Ouadie Elhamamouchi to defend the victim’s family: “Whatever the circumstances or the reality of his behavior previously, there is no There was no danger of death that justifies killing this man in cold blood. »
According to videos posted Thursday on social networks, the driver, blocked by a police car in front, first reverses before trying to disengage and restart. But he is then again blocked by the police car in front. It was at this moment that the policeman, gun in hand and standing near the vehicle, fired through the window on the driver’s side.