Two police officers are tried on Tuesday February 23 in Lyon for "willful violence" on a protester who had nine broken teeth at the end of 2019. Facts filmed and photographed by witnesses but which, at the start, had not been recorded by the police.
Arthur N., 23 at the time, believes today that the beatings he received would have been ignored if they had not been publicized.
Especially since when he left the hospital on the evening of the demonstration, he had not succeeded in filing a complaint with the police station or with the gendarmerie.
A witness then contacted the press.
Read also: A man injured during the demonstration in Lyon: an open investigation
“It appeared, through the press, that a young man named Arthur had received a baton from a police officer on Place Bellecour. This blow would have fractured his jaw and several teeth. The photographs taken during the events and published in the press showed several police officers whose uniforms suggested that they could be members of an anti-crime squad. "
Thus begins the IGPN investigation report on the case, to explain its referral by the prosecution after publication of an article on the Rue89Lyon news site describing the scene, supporting images and testimonies.
On the police side, however, the facts had hardly left any traces.
The "context report", retracing the course of the demonstration, mentioned the same day a person with broken teeth, but indicating that the origin of this injury was
"ignored"
.
Another police document mentioned beatings by the police but no procedure was opened.
It was not until the next day, after having seen photos passing through the press allowing him to be identified, that one of the police officers involved wrote two handrails to relate
"an incident" that
occurred on Place Bellecour.
"Well done"
On December 10, 2019, while more than 10,000 people demonstrated in Lyon against the pension reform, this seasonal worker passing through the city joined the procession by chance, according to him.
The atmosphere is tense around Place Bellecour, with projectile throws and tear gas canisters.
The young man departs from it and finds himself passing between activists of the CGT and the police, who shout at each other.
On a video, we see him applauding - the words of a trade unionist, he specifies - when a BAC agent brutally pulls him by the hood.
Arthur N. struggles, the police gather, kicks and batons rain, and he ends up on the ground between a tree and a newsstand.
"My teeth have exploded, I cry out in pain and fear, and there it is incomprehensible because they let go of me suddenly"
, tells AFP the one who said to have heard an official throw at him:
"well done for your face! ”
Other images then show him standing, his mouth bleeding;
he meets the chief of staff at the Departmental Directorate of Public Security (DDSP), to whom he designates those who hit him, without effect.
The IGPN report concluded that two police officers were responsible, noting that its investigation had
"failed to demonstrate the intentional nature of the blow to the jaw"
of the victim.
The two officials were the subject of an administrative investigation, on which the DDSP did not wish to comment.
They were still in office at the end of 2020, when their trial was originally scheduled to take place.