Overseas Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced Monday evening on social networks that two platoons of mobile gendarmes and 10 investigators were going to be sent to Mayotte after violence at the end of last week.
To read also: Mayotte: three people killed and houses destroyed
“
Faced with the violence of this weekend, with Gérald Darmanin, we decided to send two platoons of mobile gendarmes to Mayotte.
These reinforcements will be supplemented by a judicial task force of 10 investigators in order to arrest the perpetrators of these crimes as quickly as possible
, ”he said in a tweet.
Three people were murdered with knives in three days in Mayotte, including two teenagers aged 15 and 14, and several homes were destroyed in incidents that have aroused the concerns of residents, overwhelmed by insecurity.
"Dead day" Monday
The associations of parents of high school and college students in Petite Terre had called for a "
dead day
" Monday in the establishments, to express their "
feeling of abandonment in the face of this surge of extreme violence
" having repercussions on the children .
Earlier in the day, Marine Le Pen had tweeted: “
far from the concerns of the government which is abandoning our overseas territories, #Mayotte is sinking into ultra-violence.
Security must once again become the first of freedoms, otherwise chaos and gangs will prevail, with devastating consequences
”.
Violence is the almost daily lot of Mayotte, a department where three quarters of the population (77%) live below the national poverty line, and where nearly half of the inhabitants are under 18 years old.
According to INSEE, half of the population is of foreign nationality, a large majority of whom live illegally on the territory.