A 43-year-old drug addict was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, including one year suspended, on Friday in Besançon, after the discovery of drugs and weapons of war at his home during a "clearance" operation publicized by the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin.
On February 8, the police officers mobilized for a “place clean” operation discovered 4 kg of heroin, a rocket launcher, a submachine gun, an assault rifle and 400 rounds of ammunition at the home of this “nanny”, a particularly fragile man, diagnosed with schizophrenia, in the sensitive Planoise district of Besançon.
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“I didn't know that there were weapons in the bags, for drugs, I suspected it,” declared the man, who was appearing as a repeat offender before the Besançon criminal court.
“Certainly this gentleman is only at the end of the network, but he remains responsible for his actions” and “he has a responsibility for the scourge that drug trafficking poses in Planoise,” said the representative of the public prosecutor.
“Gargamel”
An investigation was also opened “to trace those who placed these weapons in his home”, she added, before requiring three years of imprisonment, including 18 months suspended.
The stock of drugs seized from this man with a marked face and nicknamed by the dealers "Gargamel", after the name of a character from The Smurfs, was used to supply an identified deal point.
The forty-year-old “is absolutely foreign to trafficking, we come to get him because he is addicted to crack, heroin, cocaine and cannabis,” denounced his lawyer, Me Florent Diaz. “He is a weak, sick person who would sell his soul to get his drugs. She is a victim who suffers physically from her addiction. He is unfathomably vulnerable” and “it is not up to the gentleman to bear the penal weight of these weapons,” he argued.
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The Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin made the trip to Planoise to announce this seizure and give a first national assessment of the “clean cut” operations to dismantle drug trafficking.
The Republican reconquest district (QRR) of Planoise has been the scene for several years of a gang war for the control of drug trafficking.