When a 24-year-old black man, Adama Traoré, died on July 19th after being arrested by gendarmes from Persan in the Val-d'Oise area just north of Paris it sparked angry protests in nearby residential areas as well as peaceful marches. Traoré was arrested after apparently fleeing an identity check because he did not have his papers on him. He was taken back to the police station at Persan where he was kept in a yard and died later that evening, with fire officers and medical staff unable to revive him.
The authorities have since insisted that only reasonable force was used in Adama Traoré's arrest. But his family and friends have been demanding more information on the circumstances of his death, which they suspect was due to a police “blunder”.
Now Mediapart has learnt that certain key elements of the case have yet to be provided to the judge carrying out the formal investigation, which was opened by prosecutors at Pontoise in the Val-d'Oise on July 20th, the day after Traoré's death. So far only medical details such as the results of the post-mortem examination and the death certificate issued by the hospital at Gonesse, north-east of Paris, where the young man was taken, have been handed over.
According to a judicial source a key piece of evidence that has not been passed to the investigating judge is the report from doctors from the mobile medical intervention unit, the Service Mobile d'Urgence et de Réanimation (SMUR), and medically-trained fire officers who were called by gendarmes to treat Adama Traoré. Without this document, which gives full details of the medical intervention, it is impossible to know the time that medical teams arrived, what medical care was given to the young man or even a precise description of the wider circumstances of the events leading up to his death. All that is known for certain is that Adama Traoré was arrested at around 5.45 p.m. and was pronounced dead at 7.05 p.m.
What is unclear is whether in the minutes before his death Traoré, who was still in handcuffs, was in a coma or still conscious. It is also not known whether, as has been claimed, his tee-shirt was stained with blood. For the time being all the observations made by members of the SMUR are missing from the file.
In fact even the forensic pathologists involved were not able to consult this information as they sought to establish the cause of death. Instead these experts had to rely on statements from gendarmes about what happened to the young man and the measures taken to help him, plus reports from crime scene investigators from Versailles, written on the day of the tragedy.
The pathologists also had access to evidence about the arrest itself from the gendarme unit based at nearby L'Isle-Adam and statements from gendarmes questioned about the arrest the following day, July 20th. These documents should at least enable the pathologists to know the exact circumstances of Adama Traoré's arrest. The gendarmes indeed mentioned that the young man “showed signs of being unwell”. But the pathologists have no precise medical details from the four fire officers and four members of the SMUR emergency intervention team who attended.
In fact, the doctors who first examined Traoré's body were relying on verbal statements from members of the SMUR team concerning the young man's apparent medical antecedents, such as the fact that he was supposedly suffering from “drug addiction and chronic alcoholism”. This is despite the fact that this type of information should be confirmed by more advanced and, by its nature, more long-term analysis. Questioned by gendarmes a little later, the Traoré family rejected any idea that Adama was an addict and insisted that the young man was in good health.
Another key element that experts need to determine is for how long Adama Traoré, still handcuffed, was left lying in the sun in the yard at the gendarme station on what was a hot afternoon. They will also need to be informed of exactly how much time elapsed between his arrival at the station and the call for medical assistance. The pathologists noted hyperthermia in Adama Traoré's corpse, with his body temperature having risen to 39.2 degrees Celsius. Was this rise due to the heatwave that day, a fever or the fact that the young man had been left in a yard in the sunshine? Precise details about the medical intervention, including when it took place, should allow these questions to be answered. This is why the dead man's family is now considering legal action. Contacted by Mediapart one of the Traoré family's lawyers, Yassine Bouzrou, explained: “We are thinking about it and cannot rule out making a formal complaint for concealing evidence.”
Meanwhile the official version of events, as given by the public prosecutor from Pontoise, Yves Jannier, is slowly falling apart. The day after the tragedy he suggested to French news agency AFP – the only means of communication he has chosen – that the cause of death was a “heart attack” and a “very serious infection affecting certain organs”. Yet the preliminary post-mortem examination report performed by a forensic pathologist from the medical-legal institute at Garche hospital makes no mention at all of any heart problem. The first sentence says: “Absence of an immediate cause of death.” It then mentions a “non-specific symptom of asphyxia”. A “symptom of asphyxia” was then confirmed in a second autopsy carried out on July 26th. Yet though public prosecutor Yves Jannier clearly knew of this report, he has still preferred to place emphasis on “the absence of significant violence” in relation to Adama Traoré's body.
The evidence given by the gendarmes who carried out the arrest has now been revealed in a report by L'Obs weekly news magazine. The gendarmes claim: “We used the force strictly necessary to bring him under control.” They later added: “He took the weight of all our three bodies at the moment of his arrest.” The police watchdog body the Inspection Générale de la Gendarmerie Nationale (IGGN) is now investigating to see if the gendarmes were responsible in any way for Adama Traoré's death.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter