In 2021, Marseille experienced a deadly summer with numerous assassinations linked to drug trafficking.
Two men were sentenced to eight years in prison this week for a shooting which marked the start of a bloody clash between two rival gangs.
France's second city has long experienced violence linked to drug trafficking, but recent years have seen a sharp rise in murders.
In 2023, the conflict between the Yoda and DZ Mafia gangs caused a large part of the fifty murders committed in Marseille that year in connection with drug trafficking.
In 2021, the war between
“the Blacks”
of the city of Lauriers and their neighbors of Oliviers A was the cause of at least seven assassinations during the summer in these cities with rural names but undermined by poverty and violence.
Also readMarseille: who is behind the DZ Mafia and Yoda, these gangs responsible for bloody score-settling?
Conflict between the Blacks and the Oliviers A gang
On May 16, 2021, at the foot of a building in the Cité des Hirondelles, five or six young people were talking when, at 2:30 a.m., two men in black, armed and hooded, targeted them with an assault rifle.
A 15-year-old boy was slightly injured by shards of glass, the others fled.
A shooting like Marseille experiences at certain periods, up to two to three per week but, specified the prosecutor Tamara Elbaz,
“these facts mark the beginning of the conflict”
between the Blacks and the Oliviers A gang.
Elamine Chihabddine, 25 years old, known as Elams, and Sadam Youssouf, 28 years old, sentenced Monday, were arrested a few months later.
On the evening of the shooting, a crew from the anti-crime brigade (BAC), present in Les Hirondelles, chased the vehicle of the perpetrators to the Cité des Oliviers.
Like Tom Thumb, the fugitives had sown numerous elements on which their DNA would be identified.
That of Elams on the magazine of a Kalashnikov thrown in a bush, inside a glove lost on the escape route and on the Kangoo's indicator.
Sadam Yousouf's genetic fingerprints appeared on a bottle of fuel intended to set the vehicle on fire, or on a surgical mask also bearing gunshot residue.
“They are both traffickers of Oliviers A, at a high position
,” said the prosecutor, citing other cases in which the defendants are involved.
Return match
In February 2023, Elamine Chihabddine was indicted for the assassination of an alleged member of the opposing Lauriers team, killed in August 2021 in Martigues (Bouches-du-Rhône).
He is also being prosecuted for criminal conspiracy and for acts of arms trafficking, alongside a double assassination, in August 2021, targeting the manager of the Marine Bleue, a deal point from another city in the sphere of Black influence.
So many accusations that he disputes, just like the shooting at Les Hirondelles:
“I am innocent”
.
The two defendants provided other explanations for the presence of their DNA.
His co-defendant, Sadam Youssouf, convicted four times for drug trafficking, admits to just a small role as a lookout.
He is accused of the kidnapping, in 2019, of two little hands from a network,
“corrected”
in the hills of Marseille, one of these young people having been shot in the foot.
“It’s not the job of the leaders to correct those who steal the network, it’s the job of the higher-ups
,” he defends himself.
Illustration of endless
“return matches”
between rival gangs, two of the victims of the Hirondelles shootings are seated in the second row in the detainee box.
Civil parties but in detention, one of them, a member of the Lauriers, is implicated in a kidnapping followed by death, committed on August 21, 2021. An alleged member of the Oliviers A had been thrown into the trunk of a vehicle which was going be burned.
The victim was alive at the time of the fire.
The rivalries were erased to form a united front in front of the judges.
The two victims of the Hirondelles shooting came to the aid of the defendants.
“For me, it's not them
,” said the minor who was injured and is now in prison for his alleged role in another unspecified case.