Information first comes to us in a confusing way. “The R is injured.” Then, very quickly: “The R took a bullet in the thigh”.
On social networks, some open-faced testimonies do not hesitate to affirm that Rodrigue Petitot was the victim of a gunshot.
TO LISTEN Sound extract from a video posted on social networks
And at the same time, filmed live, the muscular charge of the intervention of the CRS 8 to unblock the Mahault roundabout, circulates in parallel.
The activists are scattered in confusion and tension.
The president of the RPPRAC (Rally for the Protection of Afro-Caribbean Peoples and Resources) then broadcasts the images of his injury himself on social networks. Supported by activists, he showed up with a cut on his thigh and an injury to his hand. Blood is visible on the ground.
Very quickly, the information was confirmed: Rodrigue Petitot was taken to the Emergency Department of the Martinique University Hospital.
On site, at Mahaut levelour journalist who has been present since the morning has been trying to disentangle fact from fiction. By midday, the gunshot wound becomes more of a “flashball or flashball shrapnel wound.”
Another journalist mobilized at the Calebassier bridge hears of an injury while climbing a fence. Again, given the tense events currently unfolding, it is difficult to verify.
On the networks, a first audio from an anonymous woman supports this thesis.
TO LISTEN Testimony on the origin of the injury
At the beginning of the afternoon, certain sources then mentioned a fall on a motorcycle, scenario quickly dismissed.
And the purported photo of the “R” finger, quite crushed, begins to circulate. Its authenticity is later denied, on these same social networks.
Confirmation and denial
In a press release, representatives of the RPPRAC in turn confirm Rodrigue Petitot’s injury to his hand and leg, without saying more about the origin of the injuries but specifying that he was “chased” (by the police).
Through cross-checking and denials, it was only in the middle of the afternoon that the real origin of the “R” injury began to emerge.
The prefecture provides a denial in turn, on the “numerous rumors spread on social networks, concerning a gunshot wound”: “this information is absolutely false and this rumor totally unfounded”.
At the end of yesterday, while Rodrigue Petitot is still hospitalized at the University Hospital, a video, since authenticated, provides, through images, confirmation of the nature of the injury.
It was while climbing a fence, in the wake of the CRS 8 charge, that the leader of the RPPRAC was injured earlier in the morning.
