A 16-year-old teenager was arrested at the beginning of the week as part of the investigation into the death of Socayna, a 24-year-old student who was a collateral victim of drug trafficking and was cut down in mid-September in her room in a Marseille housing estate, said the floor Friday.
Arrested after five months of investigation, the young man, in police custody, was being brought before an investigating judge, Marseille public prosecutor Nicolas Bessone told AFP, confirming initial information from the daily
La Provence
.
The magistrate announced that he would hold a press conference at 6 p.m. on this issue, one of the most sensitive of 2023 in Marseille, a year which saw France's second city mourned by 49
“narchomicides”
.
Socayna, a law student, was hit in the head on September 10 around 11 p.m., by a stray bullet which had passed through the wooden plywood located below the window of her room.
She was at home with her mother, on the third floor of a building located in a city in the 10th arrondissement, in the south-east of Marseille.
Read alsoKilled by a stray bullet in her apartment: in Marseille, shootings plunge local residents into anguish
A bullet through his bedroom window
In a state of brain death, she was transferred to hospital where she finally died two days later.
“The day they killed my daughter, everyone was at the window.
The two thugs were on a motorbike, helmeted, with Kalashnikovs,”
Layla, his mother, explained to AFP shortly after the tragedy.
“My daughter was shot in the head in her bedroom, in her pajamas, she was working on her computer. Who can explain this?
, she added.
On site, at the foot of this building in the Saint-Thys city, a priority district, where a deal point was set up during the summer, investigators found 23 Kalashnikov shell casings.
Three other apartments were hit by these shots, with no additional injuries.
His death was a shock for this neighborhood, which until then believed itself to be safe from the narchomicides which plague France's second largest city.
Among the 49 deaths in 2023, against a backdrop of drug trafficking, four collateral victims were recorded, including Socayna.
A few weeks after his death, several hundred people marched in the neighborhood during a white march to say
“stop the violence in Marseille”
.
With this death,
“we have reached the ultimate level”
of violence linked to drug banditry, estimated the former public prosecutor of Marseille, Dominique Laurens.
“It’s an absolute tragedy,”
lamented Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin.