This is one of the main Marseille gangs involved in drug banditry. Ten alleged members of the DZ mafia were indicted for an assassination attempt in January 2023 in Spain, the prosecution announced on Saturday March 16.
These ten people are among the 13 arrested on Monday in Rennes, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence and in Marseille for 11 of them, the prosecution announced in its press release, without specifying which ones are concerned by the indictments.
Two of the people arrested will subsequently be summoned before the Marseille investigating magistrates, “because of their place of arrest or their state of health”. Of these ten people indicted, seven were placed in pre-trial detention and three under judicial supervision.
The ten men and three women aged 15 to 25 arrested on Monday are suspected of being members of the commando, logisticians and those who participated in the arson which targeted the premises of the victim’s company, on January 24, 2023 , in Empuria Brava, in Catalonia. The target was a 43-year-old from Marseille, himself known for drug trafficking.
“Franco-Spanish police and judicial cooperation”
This police operation is “a new illustration of excellent Franco-Spanish police and judicial cooperation”insisted the prosecution on Saturday, stressing that a joint team of investigators had been composed in June, with members of the Mossos d’Esquadra in Spain, representatives of the judicial police (PJ) of Marseille and Perpignan and staff of the Central Office for the Fight against Organized Crime (OCLCO) of the PJ.
These arrests occurred just a few days after the arrest in Morocco of Félix Bingui, 33, alias “the Cat”, the alleged leader of the Yoda clan, rival of the DZ mafia in Marseille.
The territorial war for control of Marseille’s lucrative deal points left Marseille bloody in 2023, with 49 people killed, including four collateral victims. Some 35 of these murders were directly linked to rivalries between the two clans, Pascal Bonnet, deputy to the judicial police in the south of France, said in January.