France’s government has moved to reassure Marseille as fear over drug-linked violence rises after a high-profile street killing shocked the southern port city.
Justice minister Gérald Darmanin said the threat from drug trafficking is now “at least equivalent to that of terrorism”, as Marseille struggles with the daylight killing of 22-year-old Mehdi Kessaci last Thursday.
Darmanin travelled to the city on Thursday with interior minister Laurent Nuñez for a high-level meeting at police headquarters.
Senior prosecutors and security officials from the Bouches-du-Rhône department were called in to examine how the city’s drug networks, including the so-called DZ Mafia, are operating and how the state plans to respond.
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National threat
“What is happening with the DZ Mafia affects at least a dozen other departments, especially in the south of France,” Darmanin said after the meeting.
France, he argued, is facing several major criminal networks at the same time and doing so “with the utmost force”.
He said he hoped new measures in France’s updated anti-drug-trafficking law would help authorities tackle what he called a lethal national threat.
Drug trafficking, he said, “kills many people and is at least equivalent to that of terrorism on national territory”.
The scale of the challenge is huge. Darmanin said authorities are “struggling” in a “very, very tough battle” with an organisation believed to generate between €5 billion and €6 billion in cash.
Even so, he said French law enforcement has made strong gains. Of the roughly 30 people said to run the DZ Mafia’s operations, “almost all of them – 27 in fact” are now in prison.
Most are held at the high-security facility in Vendin-le-Vieil in the Pas-de-Calais, with “a few others” set for new high-security units elsewhere.
Darmanin also pledged extra reinforcements for Marseille’s justice system – more magistrates, more clerks – though he stopped short of giving exact numbers.
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Corruption fears and a city in shock
One of his strongest warnings focused on corruption. He said investigators are examining a dozen cases involving public agents suspected of giving sensitive information to drug gangs.
“We must also fight corruption, which affects the investigative services and possibly the courts,” he said.
The visit comes as Marseille reels from the killing of Mehdi Kessaci.
He was shot dead in broad daylight in what prosecutors believe may have been a “crime of intimidation” aimed at his brother, Amine Kessaci, a well-known environmental activist who has become more outspoken against the city’s drug networks.
Interior Minister Nuñez backed Darmanin’s view, saying Mehdi’s killing appeared designed “to instil fear and, in a way, to target the Republic and the State”.
He said the government “is well aware that much more needs to be done” to push back against drug-linked violence.
For Marseille, a city that has faced repeated outbreaks of gang violence, the ministers’ visit was meant as reassurance as well as enforcement.
The French state now views the drug war not as a minor policing issue but as a fight on a par with its long battle against terrorism.
(with newswires)
