A French court has cleared two police officers accused of failing to help a group of youths who ran into an electricity substation where two of them died, sparking three weeks of rioting across the country nearly 10 years ago.
The judge threw out the charge of “non-assistance of a person in danger” against the police who were charged with not raising the alarm or warning the emergency services.
After the judgment was announced on Monday, the lawyer for the families of Bouna Traoré, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, described the decision as shocking and accused the court of “judicial apartheid”. A third youth, Muhittin Altun, 17, was seriously injured, suffering 10% burns.
The deaths triggered the worst rioting in France for 40 years and forced the government to declare a state of emergency.
The public prosecutor had asked for the officers, Sébastien Gaillemin and Stéphanie Klein, to be cleared.
The tragedy happened during the October half-term holidays in 2005. Benna, Traoré and Altun were walking home after a football match when they crossed paths with a police van on its way to a building site in Clichy-sous-Bois, one of Paris’s troubled housing suburbs.
An inquiry found the youths had not committed any crime but had instinctively fled when they saw the police. The police, seeing them run, incorrectly concluded they had done something wrong and gave chase.
Lawyers for the teenagers’ families said it was an “absurdity” that youngsters ran because of the police and police chased because they were running.
Officer Sébastien Gaillemin, who was not one of those pursuing the boys, reported seeing two “silhouettes” climb over a grill at the edge of a local cemetery.
The youths then entered a small wooded area before climbing over the door of the EDF transformer site, ignoring warning signs. As they hid, Traoré and Benna were killed by a charge of tens of thousands of volts.
“If they’ve gone into the EDF site, I don’t give them much chance,” Gaillemin said into his police radio at the time.
Stéphanie Klein, a trainee police officer who was in the communications room and heard her colleague’s remark, was accused of not having reacted to alert either EDF or the emergency services.
Gaillemin told investigators that he checked the sub-station twice and was certain the youngsters were not there.
“Given that he was not aware there was a danger, he cannot be criticised for not having acted to do something about it,” assistant public prosecutor Delphine Dewailly argued.
The youngsters were electrocuted about 30 minutes after the police left the site.
The court judged that the two police officers were not aware of the “certain and imminent” danger for the youths.
