Two demonstrators, who appear on the recording which seriously implicates the police officers of this unit, testifying to the insults and violence of which they were victims on the sidelines of a rally organized on March 20.
The BRAV-M in the eye of the storm. Friday evening, the prefect of police Laurent Nuñez announced that he had seized the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN) after the broadcast of an audio recording, obtained by The world and Loopsider, in which we hear police officers, presented as members of the unit, making insulting and humiliating remarks towards seven young demonstrators whom they had just arrested.
Insults and humiliations
With BFMTV, two of these demonstrators, arrested on the sidelines of a Parisian procession on March 20, remember the violence of their arrest and the multiple humiliations to which they were subjected in the minutes that followed.
“He grabbed me around the genitals and said ‘you don’t have any balls’, he started insulting me right away,” said Souleyman Adoum, a Chadian student in France.
According to him, racist insults were also uttered by the police. “They took my ID, ‘where are you from? Did you come swimming? By boat? Did you hang on the wings of the plane?’ I feel attacked, humiliated and threatened too, they know my address, they told me that they will pass”, adds Souleyman.
Also arrested that day, Salomé also reports a scene peppered with theft and insults. “I hear the Brav coming up behind me, there are about twenty bikers, I go hand in the air, he sweeps me, I fall back against the cobblestones, they handcuff me. I hear a ‘bitch’, I say ‘how?’ I am told ‘shut up'”, she said, still with BFMTV.
“It was bullying after bullying, ‘your life hangs by a thread’, when I gave my name, someone reacted because he is of Hebrew descent, saying ‘this is going to get us in trouble that'”, adds Salomé.
Several open investigations
Saturday, the prefect of police, despite his referral to the IGPN, indicated that the dismantling of the BRAV-M is “obviously not on the agenda”.
“The behavior of a few individuals should not cast opprobrium on an entire unit which, in recent years, and particularly at the moment, has proven all its usefulness”, declared the prefect on France Info.
In addition, two judicial investigations were opened this week and entrusted to the IGPN following two complaints against BRAV-M police officers.
The first was filed by a woman who was beaten with a truncheon on March 18 by a helmeted policeman, when she seemed motionless, stuck against a wall with other people in the Châtelet district, according to a video posted on social media. The second concerns the punch struck by a police officer in the face of a protester on Monday evening, captured by a video widely relayed on the internet.
