The man must meet his superiors in order to understand the circumstances of the incident. His colleagues fear a sanction against him.
The facts date back to Friday December 6, between 9 and 10 p.m. That evening, a bus driver from line 1 in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne) demanded that two young minor passengers, who got on at the Barcelona-Maréchal Leclerc stop while refusing to pay their ticket, get out of the vehicle.
In video footage of the incident, a heated altercation began and the two minors insulted and spat in the direction of the driver after the driver tried to grab them and caused one of them to fall to the ground. .
“So you get out, come on. You get off very quickly,” urges the driver. “Come on, I’m pissing you off with your b***h mother,” one of the young passengers replies.
“He twisted”
The driver must meet the hierarchy of the Tisséo group, in charge of the bus lines in the town of Haute-Garonne, this Thursday, December 19. A meeting at the end of which the man could be sanctioned.
“The risk is not zero. He risks taking the door yes, hoping that this is not the case”, declared to BFMTV Roger Da Cunha, work colleague of the driver, who warns that in the event of dismissal, “There would be fire, I think that would make a lot of people angry.”
According to the latter, this violent altercation is quite frequent on the Toulouse network. He also denounces a lack of support from public authorities.
“Today, we have drivers who are left to their own devices. Being insulted by your mother, your grandmother, these are words that cannot be heard, especially coming from children who must be 12 or 13 years old. All that means he’s twisted. Should we blame him today?” asks Roger Da Cunha.
“We are going to talk with the driver, to find out how he is doing. There is no question of dismissal,” tempers Tisséo to Le Figaro.
“Guilty silence”
Still on BFMTV, the mayor of Toulouse, Jean-Luc Moudenc, says he provides full support to the driver. “If I had remained silent, it would have been a guilty silence, even complicit. What I hope is that this council has the intelligence to take a step back and look at the whole problem,” says the one who also wrote a message of support on the social network
During this interview, the video surveillance images of the bus will be analyzed in order to understand the context which took place before and after the altercation.
As Le Figaro specifies, the day after the altercation, the driver and the two minors, well known for not paying their transport tickets and punished on several occasions by fines which were never paid, could explain calmly.
Jean-Wilfrid Forquès, Théo Bassilana with Hugo Septier
