“I am so sad. We were supposed to see each other soon, and I will never see him again. From what I understand, he wanted to intervene and try to calm the atmosphere. But it went badly.” Three days after the shooting at a wedding gathering guests from the Turkish community at the Eden Palace in Thionville, the relatives of Tolga K., 34, who died while being transferred to hospital, are in shock. Several tributes to the man from Metz-Borny have been shared on social media.
Another young man, named Malcolm, died from his injuries, the court confirmed in The essential Monday, while two other people taken into care as an emergency were no longer in critical condition. A very heavy toll that testifies to the violence of the Kalashnikov assault, undoubtedly premeditated and emanating from organized crime.
The almost immediate transfer of jurisdiction from the Thionville public prosecutor’s office to the Nancy JIRS, which specialises in organised crime, constitutes yet another clue, even if the justice system is still very cautious at this stage about the motives for the shootings. However, everything seems to point the investigation towards drug trafficking.
First, the profile of the victims, all from the Metz region and known to the police for at least some of them. According to our information, Tolga K. had already been shot during a shooting in Metz-Nord, in September 2023. The second victim, she, would have been directly targeted.
Several sources of The essential evoke a “commando” of three people from the Marseille region, linked to drug trafficking. A hypothesis that the judicial authority refuses to comment on at this stage: “We will not communicate on the substance of the case. This is not the time,” responded to The essential Vincent Légaut, deputy prosecutor in Nancy.
Plagued by drug trafficking and a war between rival gangs, Marseille is frequently the scene of score-settling, with 49 homicides in 2023 and 6 since the beginning of the year. But the ramifications of these networks are felt throughout the southern part of France, and sometimes much further afield.
