Rampant drug-fuelled violence in France is turning the country into what has been dubbed a ‘Mexicanized narco-state’ by a leading politician.
Narco wars are being fought across the country and have seen teenagers and children shot, stabbed and burned alive, gang kingpins broken out of custody, and cocaine washed up on beaches.
France’s new conservative interior minister recently declared war on the operating gangs after a 15-year-old boy was caught in the crossfires and killed in a massive brawl and gunfight in Poitiers, on November 1.
The violence erupted in front of a restaurant and turned into a shootout involving up to 600 people, France’s Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said.
‘Narco scum today have no limits, this isn’t happening in South America but in Rennes, in Poitiers, in parts of western France that once enjoyed a reputation for peace and quiet,’ the minister added.
He spoke during a visit to Rennes, Brittany, where a five-year-old boy was left with critical injuries after being hit in the head by a stray bullet during a drug-related collision at the end of last month.
But not even 24 hours after Retailleau left the city, a 19-year-old died after being fatally stabbed in the Maurepas neighbourhood, which police said is rife with drug crime.
France’s Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau said: ‘Narco scum today have no limits’ after a boy, 15, was killed in a gunfight in Poitiers on November 1
Armed police during Retailleau’s visit to Rennes amid concern over drug-related violence
Police have been working across towns nationwide to fight drug trafficking
A drugs menu pictured sprayed onto a wall in Nimes – where a 10-year-old boy was killed in suspected drugs violence in 2023
Michel Barnier’s new government is now under increasing pressure to act as France descends further into a hellhole of mass killing and drug crime.
Across the country, at least 16 hotspots of violence have been uncovered in recent years, from Nimes – where a 10-year-old boy was killed in suspected drugs violence in 2023 – to Paris, as shocking statistics of death and destruction emerge on an almost daily basis.
Once mainly associated with Marseille, gun battles between drug gangs have become more frequent in Grenoble, and have even begun spreading out into cities including Poitiers, Clermont-Ferrand, Valence, and Villeurbanne.
In Valence, a 22-year-old man was shot dead and two others wounded as they queued outside a nightclub for a Halloween party on Thursday night; the following day an 18-year-old was gunned down and killed in a suburb of the same town.
In Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, a man was shot dead, and in Clermont-Ferrand a teenager is in a critical condition after receiving a bullet in the head.
At the start of the year, Grenoble was described as ‘France’s Silicon Valley’ – embodying Emmanuel Macron’s glittering ‘start-up nation’.
Just nine months later, however, the city was dubbed one of the most dangerous places in France, according to The Spectator.
Following a summer of bloodshed which saw 19 shootings between rival cartels as they battled for control of the lucrative drugs market.
In September, a father-of-two, Lilian Dejean, 49, was shot dead in Grenoble by a man named by police as Abdoul D, an individual with convictions for theft, violence, and drug trafficking.
Drug crime is rife in the city, and has been for decades due to its proximity to Marseille – notorious for being the epicentre of the French narcotics industry.
The city has been a major hub for the European drug trade since the 1960s when it was used by the Corsican mafia to smuggle heroin grown in Asia to the US in a route known as the French Connection.
But Marseille is still a prominent transit point for drug trafficking today, with some of its dealing spots bringing in between £21,000 to £76,000 daily.
Marseille has had 17 drug-related killings this year, after breaking a record in 2023 with a staggering 49.
The conflicts are thought to be part of a turf war between two local gangs, known as the DZ Mafia and Yoda.
Police officers arrest suspected members of a drug trafficking network at a dealing point in the Maison-Blanche housing project, in the northern districts of Marseille, southern France, on December 11, 2023
Cannabis plants found at a home in Poitiers during a cleanup operation in April 2024
On October 4, 2024, a 36-year-old football player, Nessim Ramdane, was shot and killed ‘in cold blood’ by a 14-year-old
Drugs bag seized by police in Marseille on December 11, 2023
Police officers check the IDs of young lookouts at the entrance of La Busserine housing project in the northern districts of Marseille
The 49 cutout silhouettes representing dead bodies are seen on the steps of Marseille’s Courthouse during an action in memory of Marseille’s 49 drug-related deaths in 2023
Families hold a banner reading ‘justice for families; stop to the killing of our children’ during a white march following an overnight flare up in drug gang violence in Le Castellas district of Marseille, southern France, on April 3, 2023
The city’s new public prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone, two weeks ago denounced the ‘unprecedented savagery’ of brutal attacks that have highlighted the severity of Marseille’s deadly drug trade.
A 15-year-old boy was stabbed 50 times and burned alive, while a 14-year-old boy was hired as a hitman to kill 36-year-old football player Nessim Ramdane ‘in cold blood’.
The use of teenage hitmen is causing fears to rise across the country, with journalists Jeremie Pham-Le, Vincent Gautronneau and Jean-Michel Decugis branding them teenagers ‘galvanised by extreme violence, who think they’re living in a video game but shoot live ammunition’.
Marseille’s drug lords have been recruiting small-time foot runners with advertisements on social media, ‘outsourcing’ street dealings to youngsters known as ‘jobbeurs’.
Bessone said on Sunday that now young boys were responding to ads not only to sell cannabis resin but also to kill ‘without any remorse or reflection’.
But beyond France’s second-biggest city, the drugs epidemic has even hit its capital – dubbed the City of Love – which is rife with crack cocaine.
In the Eole Gardens, in northeast Paris, just a short walk from the major tourist hotspot Montmartre – small children play on swings in the renovated park, but just a few hundred metres away sit hundreds of homeless crack addicts.
According to Frace24, the addicts were grouped in the park in a bid to keep them from roaming the streets in a decision that stirred tensions between drug dealers and local residents as the country desperately grapples with its spiralling drug problem.
Groups of men and women have been spotted sitting on park benches with litter up to their knees, while others lay face down in dirt and urine as ‘dealers move among the bushes, whispering incentives to seduce their clients with crack from the ‘kitchen’ on a nearby street’.
‘People are coming here from Paris, the suburbs, the countryside,’ said Jose Matos of the NGO Gaia as his colleagues handed out face masks, bottles of water, injection material and clean crack pipes to users at the edge of the garden in 2021.
Matos was concerned that grouping users in the same place made life much more violent for smokers, particularly for women, two of whom were raped in broad daylight.
Police arrested 255 people for selling crack cocaine in Paris in 2023, compared to 285 in all of 2022.
Along with crack cocaine, heroin is also one of the major drugs taking over the streets of France as the government scrambles for ways to crack down on the uncontrollable situation.
A group of addicts smoking crack in the Jardin d’Eole, Paris, which was opened to crack users until late at night in 2021
French authorities decided to open this public park until 1am to urge crack addicts to gather there
A car allegedly used by crack addicts in Paris in 2021
The addicts were grouped in the park in a bid to keep them from roaming the streets
Police arrested 255 people for selling crack cocaine in Paris in 2023, compared to 285 in all of 2022
A 53 year-old construction worker who said he went two or three times a week to score crack at the Jardin d’Eole, in Paris
Pictured: Crack stones found at the park, located just a short walk from the major tourist hotspot Montmartre
In Lille, famous for being a charming, cultural hub within the country, it now has an ever-growing reputation for being a major point of heroin trafficking.
The decrease in heroin prices has led to an increase in consumption, with sniffing and smoking replacing traditional injection.
The cocaine market is the second largest drug market in France, with most of the cocaine arriving through two primary entry routes.
The first route is through the port of Le Havre, where the drug arrives in containers from Ecuador or Brazil, and the second route is via French Guiana, where cocaine is transported by road from Suriname and then flown to Paris using human mules or sent in cans through postal parcels.
One area in France that has been flooded by cocaine is Dijon – a pretty town facing a new wave of drug-related violence.
Hostilities erupted in November 2023 when a man, 55, was killed by a stray bullet as he slept in his home in the Avenue de Stalingrad.
Following the tragedy, a 19-year-old was fatally stabbed in the Talant district and a 15-year-old boy was shot dead at a drug dealing point in the Belvedere estate.
Cedric Bovrisse of the Alliance police union in Dijon told The Telegraph: ‘The Marseillais have arrived,’ adding that members of DZ Mafia were seeking inroads in the town of 160,000 which has a half-dozen drug dealing spots.
‘Now they’re arriving in Dijon and they want to take control of the big deal points that generate more than €10,000 a day.
‘They come well-armed. Before they went after the bosses, now they don’t hesitate to shoot the foot soldiers.’
In March, Macron launched a high-profile XXL anti-drugs clean up operation, called Place Nette, which saw hundreds of French police being sent to known drug dealing spots across the country.
That month, Dijon’s most troubled areas were flooded by some 600 police officers over a three week period and resulted in 375 arrests, the seizure of 535kg of cannabis resin, 51kg of cannabis, 7kg of cocaine, 47 firearms and over €1.8 million.
Just two months later, in Rouen, AK47-wielding killers shot dead two prison officers in an ambush to free drugs kingpin Mohamed Amra- dubbed ‘The Fly’.
In May, the ‘highly dangerous’ inmate was freed by four gunmen who stormed a cop convoy and slaughtered the two officers.
At the time, he was Europe’s most wanted criminal after allegedly ordering a mafia style execution in Marseille in 2022.
A police source said he had ties to the city’s notorious Blacks gang.
Inmate, Mohammed Amra, reportedly nicknamed ‘La Mouche’ (The Fly), was being transported between the towns of Rouen and Evreux in Normandy before the bloodbath unfolded in May
A graphic detailing how the deadly attack unfolded at a motorway toll station in north-west France earlier this year
French police officers carry equipments from a building, during a ‘XXL Cleanup operation’ (Place Nette), launched simultaneously in several towns across the country to fight drug trafficking, in the Saint-Eloi area in Poitiers, in west-central France on April 3
Packages discovered on the beach at Normandy, northern France. It was unknown how they arrived there
The cocaine is said to be of around 80 per cent to 90 per cent purity and posed a health risk to members of the public
Dranguet Beach, Reville, where drugs with a street value of around £133million were discovered
Also in the Rouen area, in a chaotic trial that lasted from the end of May to the end of June, the Bobigny court tried 18 defendants in connection with a high grade cocaine, heroin, and cannabis trafficking operation based in Canteleu, a poor commune.
The former socialist mayor of the town, Melanie Boulanger, was also on trial for complicity in drug trafficking, but repeatedly denied any involvement in the affairs of the Meziani clan – a family with an iron grip on the drug trade in her town, outside Rouen.
At the end of June, the Bobigny public prosecutor’s office requested Boulanger be handed a one-year suspended prison sentence, as well as five years’ ineligibility to stand for office and a €10,000 fine.
In the eyes of the prosecutor, the mayor’s previous passing on of sensitive information to the traffickers under duress, as well as some of her dealing with the local police, amounted to a ‘non-aggression pact’ with the traffickers.
The French island Corsica is also known to have mafia links, and for locals, threats, hush money, and mafia killings are not a rarity.
Often dubbed ‘the island of beauty,’ Corsica is the region in France, excluding its overseas territories, with the highest murder rate in relation to the number of inhabitants.
Last year, the island recorded 3.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, with many of the killings perpetrated by the mafia, according to the Interior Ministry.
According to an internal report by an anti-mafia unit of the police and gendarmerie, quoted by French media, 25 criminal gangs are active on the island.
Today, criminal gangs have not only infiltrated the construction industry and real estate business, but now also control drugs trafficking.
Cocaine has also appeared washed up on Normandy shores – with a package worth an estimated £133million was found by opportunistic gangs on quad bikes.
Police – who later recovered some of the packages – dubbed the beach raiders ‘narco tourists’.
Bruno Retailleau, a member of the right-wing Republicans and seen as a hardliner on security issues, has now urgently called for the battle against drug violence to become a ‘nationwide effort’ since becoming interior minister in Prime Minister’s shaky minority government.
According to the concerned politician, France has now reached a ‘tipping point’ as the drug hell continues to sweep through the country.
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