Three Marseille police officers were sentenced on Tuesday to prison terms of up to one year for the burglary of an apartment where they intended to seize money from drug traffickers.
The three men, who formed a night rescue police crew in the 3rd arrondissement of Marseille, in the heart of the city, are now dismissed.
They will serve their sentences at home under the electronic bracelet regime, said the president of the Marseille Criminal Court Cécile Pendariès.
The court imposed two years in prison, one of which was suspended on one of the three men, a peacekeeper, and eighteen months in prison, including eight months suspended on his colleague police brigadier.
The third defendant, a security assistant who had just been admitted to the peacekeeper competition, was sentenced to one year in prison, including six months suspended.
"If there had been money, we would have taken it to share it"
On February 4, 2017, the three officials entered a building around 10 p.m. under the pretext of a nighttime noise and smashed down the door of an apartment with a ram, weapon in hand. An informant had told them that this accommodation served as a “nurse” for a drug resale network operating in the neighborhood. According to this informant, the money must have been in a bag in the entrance, but the police finally found nothing. At the hearing on June 25, one of the defendants, in the police for 18 years, admitted that "if there had been money, we would have taken it to divide it into three".
If the security assistant had quickly confessed the facts, his two colleagues had initially delivered an incredible version to the IGPN, the police force.
According to them, 50 Kalashnikovs were to be moved from this apartment the same evening and they would have staged this break-in in order to involve their colleagues.
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The officials were well rated, with good service records, one of them had even been targeted by gunfire during an operation.
"We were there to pick up the shit from the other cops, we could not move forward, not change departments, not do an internship", defended one of the defendants.
At the hearing, the prosecutor had requested sentences with a part of firm prison of twelve, fifteen and eighteen months according to their implication. The magistrate had pointed out "an inadmissible deviation of the missions of the national police force, inconceivable for the citizen": "Armed by the State, equipped by the Republic, they took an hour of their working time to go and make a burglary".
