On October 27th, 2005, two police officers chased three teenagers into an electricity sub-station in a Parisian suburb where two of them died after being electrocuted. Their deaths provoked three weeks of major riots around Paris and across France (see timeline of events here). On Friday 20th September, almost eight years later, a French court ruled that the two officers should stand trial, on charges of failing to provide assistance to persons in danger. The officers had chased the teenagers into a power sub-station at Clichy-sous-Bois, east of Paris, and had not alerted anyone that the youths were in grave danger.
The families of the two teenagers who died, Zyed Benna, aged 17, and 15-year-old Bouna Traoré, welcomed the decision by the court of appeal in Rennes, western France. “It is a message of good news sent to the youths in the suburbs,” said one of the families' lawyers Jean-Pierre Mignard, who is also Mediapart's lawyer. For some, it will be seen as a belated gesture of recognition towards a section of society that often feels as if it is treated as second-class citizens. The third youth who was chased, Muhittin Altun, who was 17 at the time, was badly burnt in the incident.
The journey towards obtaining a trial in this high-profile case has been a long and tortuous one. The breakthrough came a year ago on October 31st, 2012, when the criminal division of the court of appeal, the Cour de cassation, overruled the court of appeal in Paris which had said proceedings against the two officers should be dropped. The Cour de cassation then sent the case to examining magistrates at the court of appeal in Rennes, who have now definitively ruled that the two policemen should stand trial.
According to their lawyers, the victims' families have endured the long wait with dignity, despite the many frustrations and obstacles they have had to overcome. “Everything in this case has been excessive,” said Jean-Pierre Mignard and his colleague Emmanuel Tordjman, who is also a lawyer for Mediapart. “There were some very tough comments and some untruths on the part of the minister of the interior at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, about the offences these children were said to have committed, and the claim that there was no chase,” said the lawyers.
In fact the youths, who had no criminal record, had been returning from a football match when the incident occurred in the late afternoon of October 27th, 2005. They had seen police cars and started to run, with officers then pursuing them. “It was Ramadan and they were afraid that an identity check would make them late and that their parents would tell them off,” explained Jean-Pierre Mignard.
Scared, the youngsters had scaled the fence of the sub-station and gone inside the transformer. “Police officers were running, without know why, after children who were running without knowing why,” said the lawyer. At 5.36pm on that afternoon a police officer sent a radio message: “The two youngsters have been located and are in the process of climbing over to get into the EDF [editor's note, name of the electricity firm] site.” At 6.12pm they were electrocuted. “After 40 minutes, while EDF officials have insisted that, had they been alerted, they could have cut off the current in ten minutes,” said Mignard.
At 7.10pm fire officers at the scene found the electrocuted bodies of Bouna and Zyed inside the sub-station. Muhittin had managed to get out, but was badly burned.
Half-truths and lies
Jean-Pierre Mignard said that the legal obstacles started from the beginning. “It took eight days to get an independent examining magistrate [appointed],” he said. “And the authorities did not act because incidents broke out the very same evening and turned into riots. Lies were maintained for several days, and at the very highest level the evidence was denied.”
Once a formal investigation was launched into “failure to assist a person in danger” three different examining magistrates handled the case. “The three judges all came to the same conclusion: there was evidence against the two police officers,” said Jean-Pierre Mignard.
Against the advice of the local prosecutor François Molins – now the chief prosecutor for Paris – who said proceedings should be dropped, the last of the three magistrates in charge of the case decided to send the two officers for trial. But the prosecutor appealed against the ruling, and in April 2011 the court of appeal in Paris squashed the decision to send them for trial.
Indeed, from the very start, there had been numerous attempts to prevent the case against the officers proceeding. In the immediate aftermath of the dramatic events at Clichy-sous-Bois, the two officers involved had denied having chased the youngsters. Later they claimed that the two who died had committed an offence. “The lies added to the tragedy,” said Jean-Pierre Mignard. An investigation by the police complaints authority the Inspection générale de la Police (IGP) then took apart the police officers' claims. It was only then that the prosecution services decided to refer the case to independent examining magistrates. The political and legal equivocations were met with riots in the suburbs. On November 9th, 2005 President Jacques Chirac and prime minister Dominique de Villepin declared a state of emergency, the first in France since the days of the Algerian War of Independence.
The proceedings against the police for failing to help a person in danger were based on the certainty that the officers were clearly aware of the dangers faced by the youngsters in the sub-station. The messages on their radios, which were recorded, show this. “At the same time, if they enter the EDF site I wouldn’t bet much on their lives,” one officer commented.
Yet the same officers waited for some time without doing anything, in the hope of carrying out arrests. In the end they turned back, without seeking to alert the youngsters to the danger or informing EDF.
The situation was complicated by political tensions at the time between interior minister Sarkozy and his bitter rival, the then-prime minister Dominique de Villepin, under the presidency of Jacques Chirac. And the authorities had supported half-truths and even outright lies about what really happened.
In particular, Nicolas Sarkozy had himself claimed that the three youngsters had not been chased by police officers, then that they were suspected of having carried out a theft on a building site. In reality they were simply returning home from a football match. Sarkozy's claims were later rejected by the investigating magistrates and by the Inspection générale de la Police (IGP). However the local prosecutors still supported the line taken by Sarkozy, who by now had become president of the Republic, that there was no proof the officers had acted unlawfully.
It was on October 21st, 2010, after a long and difficult investigation, that two examining magistrates Claire d'Urso and Marc Sommerer finally decided to send the two officers for trial, against the advice of the public prosecutor. However it was not until Friday September 20th, 2013, that the court of appeal in Rennes, finally upheld this ruling. This, too, was against the opinion of the prosecution services.
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English version by Michael Streeter