Tourism is in full swing in Marseille, but August is also marked by the resumption of bloody drug wars. Seven people have died since the beginning of the month, men aged between 21 and 39 shot dead in various parts of the city. The Marseille police authorities have counted 68 shootings since the start of the year, resulting in the deaths of some 30 people, a toll already higher in mid-August than that for the whole of 2022, which stood at 60 shootings and 31 gunshot deaths linked to drug trafficking. French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced on Thursday, August 17, on X (formerly Twitter) that the CRS 8, a unit specializing in the fight against urban violence, would be sent to Marseille "to carry out target operations against drug trafficking over the next few days."
This new cycle of violence, which has put an end to the lull brought about by the arrest of teams of traffickers or commandos of killers, is due to the war waged by two extremely powerful networks, one called DZ Mafia and the other Yoda. Their leaders have been identified but remain elusive, and some of their relatives have been killed, including in Spain before the summer.
These two clans, who were fighting over the lucrative market of La Paternelle, a housing estate conveniently located close to freeways, have embroiled some 20 other major sales outlets into their territorial conflicts and vendetta. This war is said to be responsible for 80% of the murders committed here since the beginning of the year.
"What we're experiencing at the moment," said Police Prefect Frédérique Camilleri at a meeting with the press on Wednesday, "is the resumption of this conflict, but we also feel as if everything is different, like we're entering a new world concerning drug-related violence with a logic of staging murders on social media." It's a paradigm shift in drug trafficking, according to the judicial police, who, despite the 11 murders solved this year, are seeing new teams of killers reappear very quickly.
The supply of young contract killers seems inexhaustible, as illustrated by 18-year-old Matteo F., suspected of several murders and who admitted earning €200,000 selling his services. Despite the fact that 2023 looks set to be a record year for violence, it is paradoxically shaping up to be the best year ever for the police. Investigators arrested five commandos in the act, a total of 17 people, the last on Tuesday, just after a murder.
An illustration of this "new world" is that on June 2, in the middle of the night, police broke down the door of a seasonal rental in the suburban port Estaque, just a few hours after an assassination attempt in the 16th arrondissement on a young man whose car had been shot at 13 times with a Kalashnikov and three times with a pistol.
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