Drug trafficking: arrest of 12 people suspected of being involved in two assassinations in Côte-d’Or in 2025

Twelve people were arrested at the start of the week following a long investigation into two assassinations in 2025 in Dijon and its suburbs, in a rivalry between two groups of drug traffickers, the police and gendarmerie announced on Saturday. Three days apart on September 4 and 7, 2025, a 50-year-old ambulance driver was riddled with bullets in his car in front of his home in Marsannay-la-Côte, then a young man died in a shooting which also left one injured in Dijon.

Tuesday, in a vast joint operation carried out in five departments (Côte-d'Or, Yonne, Oise, Var and Haute-Garonne), gendarmes and police officers from Dijon supported by the elite units of the two corps, the GIGN and the RAID, arrested "12 people suspected of having committed or permitted" the two "assassinations", we read in a joint press release from the gendarmerie and the police.

Eleven indictments

Three of the suspects were taken from prison where they were imprisoned for other matters, the others arrested in the five departments. They are suspected of these two “cold-blooded assassinations” or of their “preparation and logistics”, according to the press release. Eleven were indicted. Three returned to their cells, five placed in pre-trial detention and the others under judicial supervision. The long-term investigation began with the first homicide, allowing the Dijon judicial police to arrest six days later, on September 10, 2025, a first wave of eight suspects, four of whom had been indicted.

“The connections between the facts” subsequently made it possible to “identify several” other suspects and link them in the two homicides, “whether they are suspected of having been hired killers, drivers, order givers or logisticians,” continues the press release, validated by the Dijon public prosecutor. Police officers and gendarmes speak of an “unprecedented surge of violence (...) in the same context of rivalries between two criminal groups against a backdrop of drug trafficking”. In the first homicide, individuals in a powerful car shot and killed the father in front of his home in Marsannay. In the second, the two young people were targeted in the center of Dijon by two killers perched on a large engine scooter.