On the night of August 20 to 21, the fire ravaged a premises adjoining the brand new police station in the sensitive Pissevin district of Nîmes (Gard). Two and a half months after the fire, six people, including three minors, were taken into custody on Tuesday, November 5, the city prosecutor's office said in a press release.
The six suspects, all from Nîmes, are between 15 and 28 years old and are suspected of being involved in this fire. The investigation quickly determined that the fire had started “by a massive spread of fuel via the chimney of a butcher's shop then under construction”, next to the police station, whose building had been “affected in its solidity by the consequences of the fire,” explains the Nîmes public prosecutor’s office.
The six suspects are known for drug trafficking but, “as the investigation stands, nothing establishes with certainty a link between the destruction by fire and drug trafficking,” said the prosecution.
This brand new police station, located in the Pissevin district, one of the poorest in France, an area plagued by drug trafficking, had not yet been inaugurated.
The building had been promised by the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, the day after the tragic death of a 10-year-old boy, Fayed, the victim of a stray bullet a few steps away a year earlier.
