"I lick his blood": revelations on the barbaric lynching of Yuriy

Night melts on the Beaugrenelle shopping center, an all-glass block located a few meters from the Seine.

It is after 6 p.m. this January 15, the day before the introduction of the advanced curfew, when two customers smoking a cigarette see a teenager being beaten by a dozen assailants on the slab, the roof - gallery terrace.

The violence is unbearable: a rain of punches, kicks and hammers fall on the boy, especially to the head.

The executioners attack her inert body and then flee.

On this esplanade in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, surrounded by buildings, the two witnesses rush towards the victim to help him.

"Vanves' sons of f ***," the schoolboy murmurs in a groan.

He asks them to take a screwdriver out of his pocket and hide it.

What the two friends do by throwing it in a flower box.

A few minutes later, the teenager is taken to Necker Hospital and placed under deep sedation.

His name is Yuriy, he is 14 years old.

Less than a month after this barbaric aggression, condemned by personalities and the political class up to the Elysee Palace, the investigation of the police officers of the 3rd district of the Parisian judicial police made it possible to identify eleven suspects aged 15 to 18 .

They were indicted on January 30 and February 4, in particular for "attempted murder".

Five were imprisoned.

A "first leg" five days earlier

The investigations, of which we have taken note, have revealed a context of revenge between rival gangs in the south of Paris: "RD4" or "4FP" (for rue des Quatre-Frères-Peignot, in the 15th century), to which Yuriy, against "2BS" or "Bambes", the gang of the Vanves plateau (Hauts-de-Seine), that of the alleged aggressors.

The use of surveillance cameras also shows them fleeing by metro and tram to Brancion, a stop on the outskirts of Vanves, where they disappear.

“Research carried out with the services of the prefecture of police

[...] made it

possible to show that unlike RD4, the Vanves plateau band, was not registered, suggesting that it was a recent phenomenon in local level, note the investigators in their summary report.

The origin of their rivalry remains unknown to this day.

"

Territorial war between neighborhoods that are considered easy to live with?

Provocations on social networks?

The police have in any case discovered that the shocking beating of Yuriy, an unknown schoolboy of justice born in Uzhgorod (Ukraine), has its origin in a "first leg".

A previous attack that occurred five days earlier at the port of Javel in the 15th century.

On January 10, G.-M., a boy from Vanves, was allegedly molested and humiliated by young people from RD4.

On a video posted on social networks, we see him receiving violent blows before being forced to declare that he will not return to "the slab" and pronounce the name of the rival gang as a defeat.

"Yuriy's gang"

Questioned by the investigators, G.-M.

was not very verbose on this founding episode which would have started from a quarrel on the Internet.

The schoolboy claims to have been struck that day by "about fifteen masked and hooded individuals", of which Yuriy was "surely" part.

At any rate, he said, it was "Yuriy's gang."

Originally, it would have been a question of discussing without a fight, but things would have slipped, going into ambush.

The investigations have not yet made it possible to confirm the participation of the schoolboy tortured in this beating, even if there is little doubt for the police that he was in the Quatre-Frères-Peignot gang.

Wasn't her pseudonym “yr.4fp” on Instagram?

“Having friends in a gang does not mean being a member,” defends Nataliya, the teenager's mother.

His screwdriver on him was just for art class and he didn't hit this kid.

"

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Another witness claimed that Yuriy would have filmed the assault on G.-M., without this having been verified.

The police have not yet been able to hear the teenager due to his medical condition.

Now in rehabilitation, Yuriy narrowly escaped death.

He could have serious consequences.

The violence of the blows to the skull was such that the doctors found him with his eyes sticking out of the eyeballs.

The inventory of the arsenal of his executioners, found hidden under a staircase near the slab of Beaugrenelle, gives an idea of ​​the ordeal suffered: two iron bars, a hammer, a metal ashtray, a crutch, a wardrobe bar , a set square, a golf club ...

"RD4 will never measure up to us"

In their hunt for the attackers of Yuriy, the investigators were confronted with a certain omerta, both on the side of the friends of the minor present during the savage attack, who denied their membership in RD4, and that of the adolescents of Vanves.

Sign of this tension, the management of a high school in Hauts-de-Seine reported that a student, friend of the alleged attackers, had come to class with a hammer since the brawl for fear of reprisals ...

But police discovered the perpetrators were much more vocal on social media about Yuriy's beating, which was reportedly broadcast live on Facetime.

On a Snapchat video, we see a high school student with a metal tooth, all smiles, brandishing a bloodied white phone - probably Yuriy's - with the caption: "I lick his blood" and "the blood of enemies" .

Another video shows the slashed hand of an attacker whose voice can be heard boasting: "It's real popopopo, ah lalala revenge my boy."

Not to mention this sequence where all the suspects dressed in black and masked pose proudly on the slab of Beaugrenelle.

One shows off a pistol.

“It's empty

[…]

At 10, we returned their tieks (

Editor's note: quarters

).

Finished, we return to the city with the little brothers there.

"RD4 will never come up to us," we also read in commentary on another video.

By cross-checking between information, video surveillance images and the boundaries of the telephones present at the scene of the brawl, the police managed to identify several young people living in Vanves, Boulogne-Billancourt and Malakoff.

Among them: K. and Y., 16 and 18 years old, the half-brother and cousin of G.-M., the victim of the "first leg".

The second is suspected of having kicked Yuriy eight times.

Also figure W., the author of several Snapchat videos, recognized by a member of his family.

"Ten against one, it's a bit abused"

In police custody, most of the suspects either denied their participation in the lynching or acknowledged their presence at the scene but not having hit Yuriy.

A high school student from Vanves even claimed that he was shopping in Beaugrenelle that day and that his proximity to the brawl was due to chance.

Only A., 16, confessed to having given the final violent kick to the high school student's neck.

"I had no place to kick him because my friends took up all the space, suddenly I went around

[...]

and there a big kick in the head which allowed his guard to be destabilized", he told investigators.

If some alleged attackers have recognized a punitive expedition "to solve a neighborhood problem", they claim that they did not know Yuriy and that their intention was not to "assassinate him".

They would have benefited from a fall of the schoolboy in the flight of his group, taken by surprise.

“Ten to one is a bit overkill,” admitted J., 17, indicating that the gang was only “half satisfied” because they wanted a fair match.

"If they are able to do this to Yuriy, they are able to do this to me and my family."

They have no mercy, ”the youngest of the band broke away.

During the hearings, the exploitation of a conversation on Signal encrypted messaging between fourteen young people from Vanves, exhumed from a suspect's phone, proved to be much more instructive for the police.

The participants are worried as well as other young people "know that it is

[them]

and who exactly", advise themselves to change their pseudonym, are delighted to have made talk about them in the program "Touche pas à my post ”, insult Yuriy's mother during her media appearances and evoke their future line of defense in the event of arrests.

After this first crackdown, investigators are convinced that other actors of the lynching are still in the wild.