This Saturday around 2 p.m., a gathering will take place in Nanterre to pay tribute to Nahel Merzouk. The 17-year-old young man was killed by police shooting after refusing to comply on June 27, 2023.
A year later, a march in tribute to Nahel, killed at the age of 17 on June 27, 2023 by a police officer during a check, is organized on Saturday in Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine), an affair which had caused several days of riots and became a symbol of the fight against police violence. The march will start at 2:00 p.m. this Saturday from the Charles de Gaulle esplanade, a few hundred meters from the Pablo Picasso district, where the teenager lived.
The procession will then follow Pesaro Boulevard before reaching Nelson Mandela Square, where Nahel died. “It will be a silent march, where I will give a little speech“, declared Mounia Merzouk, Nahel’s mother, on RTL on Thursday. She will talk about her son, “how he was“and how to live”a grieving mother“.
Some 500 to 800 people are expected, according to a police source, with no risk of any particular disturbance expected. This demonstration was the subject of a declaration to the prefecture, according to the Hauts-de-Seine prefecture. According to elements of the investigation, following a chase, the vehicle driven by Nahel was stopped by traffic. A first police version, according to which the young man drove towards the biker, was quickly refuted by a video of the scene posted on social networks.
The two police officers can be seen on the side of the vehicle, pointing their guns at the driver. One of them shoots him as the vehicle starts up again. The car then crashes into a concrete block a few dozen meters away.
The police maintained that they were in mortal danger because they were trapped between the car and a wall. Florian M., a 38-year-old police motorcyclist at the time of the incident and charged with murder, was remanded in custody for five months. He was released and placed under judicial supervision in November after several requests from his counsel.
A reconstruction of the facts took place on May 5: in the presence of their lawyers, the police officer responsible for the shooting, his colleague present that day and several witnesses compared their statements, in particular to establish whether Florian M. was in danger of dead.
Nahel’s death led to riots of exceptional magnitude throughout France. Public buildings attacked, schools and courts burned, shops looted: a Senate report estimated that the damage caused by the riots, shorter but more intense than those of 2005, amounted to one billion euros.
