Poitiers shooting: the mayor asks Bruno Retailleau to “restore the truth”

His city has been at the center of the news in recent days, after the death of a teenager in a shooting. This Monday morning, the mayor of Poitiers Léonore Moncond'huy was the guest of France Inter and wanted to dot the “i”. “I hope that the minister will correct the comments he made, that he will restore the truth”she declared about Bruno Retailleau who wrongly mentioned a brawl involving hundreds of people. The elected environmentalist denounced comments which “contribute to fueling the amalgams between the youth of the neighborhoods as a whole and the traffickers as a whole”.

Thursday evening, while a Halloween evening organized by an association brought together many young people in the Couronneries district, gunshots in front of a kebab restaurant left five people injured, all minors. One of them, aged 15 and hit in the head, did not survive. Commenting on the facts Friday morning on BFMTV, the Minister of the Interior declared that after the shooting, “a brawl between rival gangs” had opposed “several hundred people”castigating the “narcoracailles” and evoking a risk of “mexicanisation” of the country. According to the police and the prosecution, however, brief scuffles only involved a few dozen people among the crowd present near the crime scene.

Poitiers exploited “in the service of an alarmist, populist discourse”

The death of a teenager is “quite tragic in itself” so as not to “spread false information”continued the mayor of Poitiers, adding that the victim “had absolutely nothing to do with drug trafficking”. For the councilor, Bruno Retailleau “committed a mistake”in “instrumentalizing the image of a neighborhood and the image of (Poitiers) in the service of an alarmist, populist discourse”.

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