A clash between warring gangs saw a rush-hour commuter line train become the scene of a blood bath, with two seriously injured by an axeman.
A 16-year-old Guadeloupe-born male was arrested in France on Monday morning after what has variously been described as a “fight”, “altercation”, and “brawl” in national media on a commuter train serving the eastern Paris suburbs. Four people were injured, two seriously, when a gang of around ten individuals boarded the train around 0755 Monday at Ozoir-la-Ferrière station, and started attacking others onboard.
Broadcaster Europe1 states weapons used by the minors included “axes, baseball bats, Japanese swords and tear gas”. One of those injured, all of whom were aged between 16 and 17 years old and reportedly on their way to school, had his hand severed. Another had his skull “split open”.
A spokesman for the Alliance Police Nationale union said the incident was a fight between two rival gangs. Those responsible had fled by the time the emergency services arrived but a 16-year-old male was arrested later the same day, with an axe found in a police search. A native of Guadeloupe, in the French Caribbean — so not technically an immigrant given Guadeloupe is a full and equal part of the French Republic, if an noncontinuous part — Le Figaro states the individual is already well known to police.
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French populist leader Marine Le Pen reflected on the severity of the attack and youth of the alleged perpetrator, and questioned whether it was time to reconsider whether softer justice should still apply to legal children when they commit crimes like adults such as splitting heads open with axes on public transport. She said: “While a majority of French people want minors to be judged as adult offenders, it is urgent to break with this dogma of the minority excuse which generates among first-time offenders the immutable feeling of impunity.
“No fight against juvenile violence will be effective until our criminal law has given back to punishment its true deterrent value.”
Several politicians associated with the town of Ozoir-la-Ferrière where the attack took place and the wider Seine-et-Marne region in south-eastern Paris are members of Le Pen’s Rassemblement national (National Rally, ‘RN’) and spoke out on the attack. National senator for Seine-et-Marne Aymeric Durox reflected: “You take the train in the morning to go to work and pay your taxes to the most taxing state in the world, and in exchange you have security, a classic Hobbesian social contract. Actually no, you take the train but “at the same time” you have savages next to you who attack with axes to kill. In France. In 2024. What hell.”
Ozoir-la-Ferrière Municipal councillor Teddy Robin — on whose patch the crime was committed — linked the attack to previous drug gang attacks in the area. He said: “it’s not the first time… they are savages, there is no other word, barbarians, it is unacceptable at that age that we can act like that. Who wants to go to work at 8am to see hands held high, blows to the head? Nobody.”
The local RN chapter called the attack an expression “barbarity” and reflected locals were not experiencing “a ‘feeling’ of insecurity”, as so often discussed by politicians and in the media, but were rather living through “a reality that is eating away”.
The prefect of the wider Ile-de-France (greater Paris) region and leader of the Soyons Libres (‘Let’s be Free’) party — a centrist-liberal strongly pro-European Union — Valérie Pécresse picked up the broader national significance of the attack, particularly given this comes just days after another large gang brawl saw five shot. She said: “The scourge of gang fights is spreading throughout the country. I call on the Ministers of the Interior and Justice to coordinate to put an end to this spiral of impunity and violence.”
These words reflected to some degree the robust language of France’s new centrist-conservative minister of the interior Bruno Retailleau, in post as part of Emmanuel Macron’s gamble to cling onto power and relevance as he sees out his term, who responded to a mass shooting on Friday by comparing it to violence in south America.
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said of the war between drug gangs: “They are traffickers who use the most ferocious means to settle scores and satisfy their desire for profit.
“It’s just that it’s not happening in South America, but in Rennes and Poitiers. We are at a tipping point. We have the choice between general mobilization and the “Mexicanization” of the country.”
