The councilor relies on article 40 of the code of criminal procedure which obliges any public officer “who acquires knowledge of a crime or misdemeanor” to take legal action “without delay”.
The socialist mayor of Montpellier, Michaël Delafosse, indicated on Monday January 6 that he had reported to the prosecutor “negationist and anti-Semitic comments” held on TikTok by a “individual based in Montpellier”notably denying in a video the existence of gas chambers. “This individual based in #Montpellier makes negationist and #anti-Semitic remarks. I initiate article 40 of the penal code with the judicial authority”declared Michaël Delafosse on the social network X. “Negationism is punishable by the Gayssot law, incitement to hatred is an offense. Anti-Semitism, racism, hatred of others have no place in #Montpellier, in France”added the mayor, republishing the «post» from another X user.
In this initial message, we can see a 2-minute video attributed to a man presenting himself on TikTok under the name “Anoss” and followed by more than 16,000 people. We hear a middle-aged man with gray hair and three-day beard describe himself as “very supremacist” the Jewish religion and declare that we have no “never found” the gas chambers used by Nazi Germany in extermination camps during World War II. AFP did not find any trace Monday evening of this video among the forty appearing on the TikTok account of “Anoss”. But in a video dated December 30, we see the same man wondering if “we are not being totally invaded from the inside by Israel”. In another video, dated December 29, he engages in “a little analysis of the Jewish religion to follow up on (son) old video ».
In France, article 40 of the code of criminal procedure requires “any public officer who, in the exercise of his duties, acquires knowledge of a crime or misdemeanor” to grab “without delay” justice. Michaël Delafosse had already used it on Saturday to denounce to the courts the publication of violent remarks, also on TikTok, made by an Algerian influencer also residing in Montpellier. Arrested on Sunday, this man called for “kill” et “to cause pain” a demonstrator opposed to the government of Algiers, at a time when several other Algerians or Franco-Algerians are in the sights of the French authorities for hateful videos on the Internet.
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