Three French police officers suspended after beating a black man

"Michel", the music producer victim of a police beating this Saturday in Paris.AURORE MESENGE / AFP

A new case of police violence recorded by a camera threatens to further heat up the intense debate in France as a result of the approval process of a controversial "global security" law that seeks to limit the dissemination of images of agents of the forces of order.

Three police officers have been suspended this Thursday and are under investigation after the

platform

broadcast a video in which a black man, a music producer, is brutally assaulted at the entrance of his own studio on Saturday night.

The case is known in the same week that the violent evacuation of a migrant camp in the center of the capital and the recording of how agents tripped a migrant and reduced a journalist led to heavy official convictions and even another investigation. judicial.

The new images, disseminated on social networks, were taken by the studio's video surveillance camera and by neighbors.

They show how the agents enter the studio behind the producer, identified as "Michel."

Quickly, they begin to beat him for several minutes on the face, head and the rest of the body, both with fists and with a baton, while uttering racist insults, according to the victim - the camera does not register sound - when filing a complaint with the General Inspection of the National Police (IGPN).

To force “Michel” and nine young men who were filming in his studio and who tried to intervene to leave, the police even threw a tear gas grenade in the small room.

Ça s'est passé samedi à Paris.

15 minutes of coups et d'insultes racistes.

La folle scene de violences policières que nous révélons est tout simply enouie et edifiant.

Il faut la irrder jusqu'au bout pour mesurer toute l'ampleur du problème.

pic.twitter.com/vV00dOtmsg

- Loopsider (@Loopsidernews) November 26, 2020

In a first statement signed by the agents and which the Agence France Presse was able to consult, they assured that they intervened to arrest "Michel" for not wearing a mask.

"When we tried to intercept him, he forced us into the building," they declared and assured that they were beaten by the detainee, a story that visibly contradicts what the camera shows, of whose existence they apparently had no knowledge.

"Without these images, the word of the victims would have had very little weight compared to that of the agents," emphasizes the

journalist

in a clear allusion to the controversial law proposed by the Government of Emmanuel Macron, which provides penalties of up to one year in prison and a 45,000 euro fine if images of policemen or gendarmes have been disseminated with the intention of harming them.

"Without these images, today I would be in prison," says "Michel", who spent 48 hours in provisional detention.

After hearing the case, the Minister of the Interior - and the main architect of the controversial law - Gérald Darmanin, demanded the suspension of the police officers involved.

For his part, the Paris prosecutor, Rémy Heitz, expressed his hope that the IGPN, the "internal affairs" of the police, will investigate quickly.

"It is an extremely important case and one that I have followed personally since Saturday," he assured AFP in an unusual statement.

The sentences have even followed from the members of the National Assembly who on Tuesday, hours after the dissemination of the images of the violent evacuation of the migrant camp, voted in favor at the first reading of the security law proposal that still must go through the Senate and return once more to the hemicycle.

“Zero tolerance against racism and against that violence!

(…) I support Michel ”, tweeted the president of the macronista majority in the National Assembly and former Interior Minister, Christophe Castaner.