It looks like a scene from a movie, in the streets of Marseille.
Two motorcycle killers follow a third motorcyclist.
As the latter slows down in a back alley on Boulevard Michelet, three shots are fired at close range.
The man collapses at the foot of a plane tree.
Reality goes beyond fiction on October 21, 1981 because the victim is none other than the most prominent magistrate of the Marseille city, Judge Pierre Michel, in charge of cases of banditry and drugs.
Marseille, already stuck for a few months in the sordid affair of the Auriol massacre, is in shock.
“
Who killed Judge Michel?
“, Asks the newspaper
Le Provençal
the next day.
"
A murdered judge and it is the entire justice that is challenged, all litigants affected
", analyzes
Le Figaro
for his part
.
Everyone then remembers a tragic precedent: the assassination of Judge Renaud, nicknamed "the sheriff", in Lyon in 1975.
Read alsoThe examining magistrate: the most powerful man in France?
The judge "hated by the underworld"
Pierre Michel, 38, son of a notary who grew up in Metz, had settled in Marseille
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