The alleged hitman of a VTC driver in Marseille, a 14-year-old teenager, was placed in pre-trial detention. The alleged sponsor has returned to Aix-Luynes prison.
On the night of Thursday October 3 to Friday October 4, a man was shot and killed in Marseille. He was found dead in his car with a wound to the back of his head. The victim was identified as Nessim Ramdane, a 36-year-old father, VTC driver and amateur footballer known in the region. He is a collateral victim of violence linked to drug trafficking. According to the public prosecutor Nicolas Bessone, the alleged assassin, a 14-year-old from Vaucluse, was recruited “for a sum of 50,000 euros”, probably on social networks, reports BFMTV by a sponsor nine years his senior. It was placed in pre-trial detention in the juvenile section of a prison in the region, the prosecution indicated on Sunday evening.
The teenager could be unwillingly involved in a “revenge” mechanism linked to drug trafficking. The alleged instigator, a 23-year-old man who was already detained, was in turn placed in pre-trial detention and returned to his prison in Luynes, near Aix-en-Provence. The 14-year-old young man was recruited to commit this “narchomicide” with another friend of his age to “intimidate an adversary from another gang of traffickers. A judicial investigation was opened for “intentional homicide with premeditation in an organized gang , criminal association, acquisition, possession and transport of category B weapons by at least two people”, specified Nicolas Bessone, public prosecutor of Marseille.
What happened? Recruited for 50,000 euros and revenge
It all starts Wednesday evening. Two 15-year-olds recruited for 2,000 euros on social networks by the 23-year-old inmate have the mission of setting fire to the door of a competitor’s apartment to intimidate him. One of them was killed by a gang present on site in extremely violent circumstances. The second has now been arrested and placed under judicial supervision with the obligation to reside in a closed educational center far from Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône). For revenge, the alleged sponsor of the operation, the 23-year-old inmate, once again recruited on the networks another 14-year-old, from Vaucluse, to kill a member of the opposing gang for 50,000 euros. This is where the young 14-year-old hitman kills Nessim Ramdane, a 36-year-old father and VTC driver. This homicide as revenge therefore resulted in the death of a person completely outside of drug trafficking. The teenager admitted to having shot the driver but spoke of it being an accidental shooting.
An “additional degree” in violence
The events took place around 4:30 a.m., Friday October 4, rue Léon Gozlan, in the Saint-Lazare district, in the 3rd arrondissement, reports France 3 Provence-Alpes Côte d’Azur. A car crashed into the wall of a primary school. Warned, emergency services arrived on site and discovered the victim, whose circumstances of death were “incompatible with the accident”. A 9 mm warhead was found next to him. Witnesses told police that a front-seat passenger fled the scene.
The suspect and another man took a VTC towards the Félix Pyat city, where “they thought they could find their victim”, details the prosecutor during a press conference on Sunday. Arriving nearby, the passengers thought they recognized their target on the public highway and “asked the driver (…) to drop them off, to wait for them since they had something to do”. But the driver “did not comply”, and the 14-year-old suspect “shot him fatally in the back of the head”. He was “coldly shot”, which is “a novelty” and an “additional level” of violence, lamented Nicolas Bessone.
On the run, the alleged assassin hides and calls the alleged sponsor to “ask him to send him a car to exfiltrate him. Instead, the detainee dials 17 to denounce the teenager. “We never saw That. I’ve been in Marseille for 23 years, I’ve never seen that,” Rudy Manna, national spokesperson for the Alliance Police union and former departmental secretary of Bouches-du-Rhône, reacted to France 3 on Saturday. For what [dénoncer] ? This is a real question that we ask ourselves. Maybe to scare. To say ‘this is what can happen to you if you don’t do the right thing.'” The reasons why the alleged sponsor chose to denounce the suspect remain to be clarified.
L’23 year old manincarcerated in Aix-Luynes prisonexplains that he was the instigator of the murder. He claims to be part of the DZ mafia, one of the main gangs involved in Marseille drug trafficking, details The Parisian. A police source told France 3 that the murder “was ordered in response to a (previous) settling of scores in this same neighborhood”, during which a 15-year-old teenager was stabbed nearly 50 times and burned alive, according to the Marseille prosecutor, as indicated earlier in this article.
