A large police operation took place Monday in the Gard, near Marseille and in the North, in an investigation into shootings that took place in Nîmes at the beginning of the year against a background of narco-banditry, according to sources close to the investigation .
More than 100 police officers were mobilized to carry out these searches and these arrests, these sources confirmed to AFP.
Read also: In the hell of the Pissevin city of Nîmes, cancerized by drug trafficking
On February 10, Kalashnikov fire in the Pissevin district of Nîmes, one of the poorest in France, left three people injured, one of them seriously.
Fifteen days earlier, a similar shooting had also taken place which did not cause a victim.
The mayor of Nîmes Jean-Paul Fournier had denounced "
a war of rival gangs linked to the trafficking of arms and drugs
".
Residents of the neighborhood had demonstrated on February 21 to launch an "
appeal for help
" to the authorities in the face of the increase in drug trafficking.
Recently, the interregional director of the judicial police Eric Arella stressed for AFP that the phenomenon of settling of scores against a background of narco-bandistime, in decline in the Marseille region, was however on the rise this year, especially in Nîmes and Perpignan. .