Some 300 people gathered Saturday, May 20 in Charleville-Mézières (Ardennes) to demand justice for a young man killed last December, accusing the police and justice of failings, noted an AFP photographer. On December 9, 2022, Mahamadou Cissé, 21, was killed by a rifle shot in the priority neighborhood of Ronde-Couture, facts for which an octogenarian neighbor was indicted.
After speeches and prayers, the participants, dressed for many T-shirts "Justice for Mahamadou" went to the scene of the tragedy where they laid roses, according to the AFP photographer. The prosecutor of Reims, Matthieu Bourrette, had evoked after the fact the track of a "murder by exasperation".
'Crime of exasperation'
According to him, the alleged perpetrator, a retired worker former member of naval commandos who participated in the Algerian war, had said in custody to have opened fire after being insulted by this young man and attacked by his group, which "had led him a hard life for nine years". The investigators should "refute or confirm the thesis of the accused, of what I would call the crime by exasperation," said the magistrate.
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Murder by exasperation, it does not exist in the law, it is to diminish the value of the life of my brother, "rebelled to AFP, reached by phone, the older sister of the young man, Assetou Cissé, who organized this day of tribute. According to her, the case is marked by many negligences. In particular, it regrets that some witnesses were not heard. Among them, another resident of the building, who had called the municipal police ten days before the facts to warn that the octogenarian was armed and threatened to kill a young man.
For Assetou Cissé, this testimony proves premeditation, while the octogenarian is indicted for murder and possession of an illicit weapon but not for murder. "With all the shortcomings, all the negligence that is in our file, inevitably the link of racism arrives," she points out. "My brother is black, it takes place in a neighborhood and (the respondent) is a former soldier, so the file is sloppy, there is contempt," she denounces. Assa Traoré, the sister of Adama Traoré, who died on July 19, 2016 after his arrest in Beaumont-sur-Oise (Val d'Oise), intervened by videoconference during the day of tribute.
