The owner of a house located in Bobigny (Seine-Saint-Denis) tried to dislodge the alleged squatters from his home with the help of people contacted on social networks. The police intervened during the attempted extraction and 23 people are in custody.
They are detained for “degradation”, “violence in meetings” and “home invasion”, learned Le Figaro from the Bobigny prosecutor’s office.
Last Thursday, during a report broadcast by CNEWS, Youcef expressed his dismay at his situation. Since October 13, his home, where he lives with his mother, has been stormed several times by three individuals.
After several attempts, they managed to break into the house on the 1er November and declared themselves owners of the premises.
“One of them told the police that I had defrauded him of 3,500 euros, explained Youcef to Figaro. They threatened me with death, broke my windshield, broke the doors, caused a lot of damage in the house, and I was the one who was interrogated”.
Severely degraded housing
Youcef had shared his revolt and declared that he would not give up to recover a good acquired forty years ago by his parents. The accommodation was heavily degraded by the new occupants, it was specified during the report.
Many complaints had been filed and associations contacted, to no avail.
According to Le Figaro, several residents of Seine-Saint-Denis who saw the report then decided to lend a hand to Youcef and his mother. A young nurse interviewed by the daily said he went there “after a call on social networks, so we found ourselves at a meeting point, a few hundred meters from the house, on Saturday around 8 p.m. time”.
“We were 26, mostly students,” he added, adding that Youcef was present with his mother and sister. The given objective is not to use violence while “not being intimidated”.
Once inside, the group found themselves facing a couple with a three-year-old child, accompanied by two other men. The residents’ dog was deemed harmless by the “dislodgers”. As the occupants were escorted outside, the police intervened.
For its part, the Bobigny prosecutor’s office declared to Le Figaro that “the violence can be psychological: the simple fact of arriving at 23 by threatening to expel people in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter”.
An investigation is underway to verify in particular whether the occupants have paid rent to an owner, as they entrusted to Youcef.