A third investigation has been opened for intentional violence committed by a police officer after the complaint of a journalist who covered on July 8 the banned gathering in memory of Adama Traoré in Paris, said Monday the prosecutor's office, asked by AFP. The investigation was entrusted to the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN), which has already received two separate investigations into violence by police officers against two other journalists.
"Making journalists"
These three journalists, Clément Lanot, Pierre Tremblay and Florian Poitout, accuse police officers of having assaulted them when they were filming the forceful arrest of Youssouf Traoré, Adama's younger brother, accused of beating a police commissioner earlier in the day. The following day, an administrative investigation was opened to shed light on the violence. "We were several journalists filming (the arrest) when the Brav-M (policemen on a motorcycle, editor's note) made us fall to the ground," independent journalist Clément Lanot reported on Twitter.
Florian Poitout, a photographer for the Abaca news agency, said he was "thrown to the ground and beaten by Brav-M police officers", a unit already implicated in several cases of police violence. In his complaint, consulted by AFP, Pierre Tremblay says he received "a first shield blow from an official of the Brav-M, rather in the back", then a second, a few moments later, which made him fall. "Watching the videos, I wonder if the police officer who assaulted Pierre Tremblay was not there to make journalists," responded to AFP his lawyer, Me Stéphane Maugendre.
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These three investigations are in addition to the two investigations also entrusted to the IGPN last week on facts of police violence denounced by Youssouf Traoré and a woman. In addition, an investigation examines, among other things, violence committed by Youssouf Traoré during the demonstration and then during his arrest and denounced by police officers. Another investigation concerns the organization of a banned demonstration and targets in particular Assa Traoré, the sister of Adama, a 24-year-old man who died shortly after his arrest by gendarmes in July 2016 in the Paris suburbs. The authorities had banned the march in tribute to the latter, citing a tense context in France after several consecutive nights of riots following the death of the young Nahel, killed by a police officer during a road check in Nanterre at the end of June.