Firefighter injured by gunshot near Marseille: suspect indicted and placed in pre-trial detention

The 51-year-old man, who shot a firefighter on Sunday during an intervention near Marseille, seriously injuring him, was indicted Tuesday evening and placed under arrest, the Aix-en-Provence prosecutor told AFP. This man, “socially and family broken”, was indicted on charges of attempted homicide of professional firefighters in the exercise of their duties, destruction and damage by dangerous means and illegal possession of category B weapons and ammunition.

The victim, a professional chief warrant officer at the departmental fire and rescue service (SDIS), was seriously injured in the chest, hit by buckshot while firefighters were intervening to extinguish a heavy goods vehicle and light vehicle fire on the outskirts of the Plan-de-Campagne commercial area in Pennes-Mirabeau, near Marseille. The perpetrator of the shots is a man “in social and family breakdown”, unemployed, who lived on an agricultural wasteland hosting makeshift homes, caravans and several vehicle wrecks, prosecutor Jean-Luc Blachon detailed earlier in the day.

While in police custody, he gave “confused explanations”, saying that “he had decided to burn all his property” and had “shot through the trees so that someone would shoot him”. “Trenched behind a hillock”, the author of the shots ended up surrendering to the authorities after the successive intervention of a police officer, then of the Raid. When he was arrested, the man had “53 rounds of ammunition in his pockets” and investigations led to the discovery of “11 cases of hit twelve caliber cartridges” on the ground.

Tuesday, during questions to the government in the National Assembly, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez raised the hypothesis of “an ambush”, recalling that the perpetrator of the shots had “attacked the entire crew who were responding to a car fire”. This man had no criminal record but was due to appear before the Aix-en-Provence criminal court on November 3 for carrying a weapon, threatening to kill a person holding public authority and damaging the property of others.

The attack on the 53-year-old chief warrant officer aroused strong emotion in the ranks of firefighters, who gathered on Monday afternoon in front of their barracks, throughout France, in solidarity with their colleague, still hospitalized in Marseille. Since 2021, nearly 1,500 attacks, both verbal and physical, have been reported each year to the General Directorate of Civil Security and Crisis Management (DGSCGC), the latter indicated in a press release on Monday. In detail, “39 situations of violence with supposed premeditation, described as “ambushes” by the fire and rescue services (Sdis), were recorded in 2025”, after 50 in 2024, according to the same source.