Attacks on police officers in Belfort: several suspects identified

Several people suspected of having participated in the beating of a police officer on Friday during clashes between demonstrators and the police in Belfort on the sidelines of the high school movement have been identified, the prosecutor, Paul-Edouard Lallois, told AFP on Saturday.

“We now have several people identified as likely to be among the main perpetrators” of the attack on the police commander, he said late Saturday morning, saying he was “fairly optimistic” about the prospect of arresting them within 24 hours.

The investigation is open for attempted murder of the police officer born in 1967, head of the departmental territorial intelligence service of the Territoire de Belfort. The magistrate did not specify how many suspects had been identified or whether they constituted all of the suspects sought. A 17-year-old young man arrested the day before in connection with the attack was released from police custody on Saturday afternoon without charges brought against him, as there was no evidence showing that he had hit the police officer.

The young person “cannot be immersed in water”

“He was nevertheless on site and his statements allow us to better understand the context” of the facts, said the prosecutor. Among the suspects identified was a young man whom the police commander had handcuffed on the banks of a stream shortly before the attack, the prosecutor said. Recognizable by his “handcuff on the wrist”, he is “clearly identified as coming to deliver two violent kicks to the police officer’s head”, continues the magistrate.

The prosecutor also denied claims circulating on social networks according to which the police officer put the young man's head under water while trying to control him before the attack. Videos circulating online show him struggling with the young man in the middle of a stream, before managing to immobilize him on the bank. The various videos, in which the police officer and the demonstrator are partially hidden by vegetation, do not make it possible to say whether the young man's head is submerged or not.

According to the prosecutor, “it is the individual who deliberately goes into the water” while trying to escape the agent who was pursuing him for his involvement in throwing projectiles and starting fire. “Both fall into the stream, that’s why you have, at one point, a scene with the commander kneeling in the water and the individual sprawled on the water,” he explains. But the young person “cannot be immersed in water, there is not enough water to be immersed,” according to the prosecutor.