A 10-year-old boy died this Monday night, the victim of a shooting in Nimes, specifically in Pissevin, a popular neighborhood plagued by drug trafficking, according to police and judicial sources. The shooter or shooters managed to escape, the sources added.
"Following an exchange of shots in the Pissevin neighborhood, west of Nimes, a 10-year-old boy died last night. A man was also a victim of bullets. The latter's days would not be in greater danger," said the prosecutor of the Republic of Nimes, Cécile Gensac, in a press release on Tuesday morning.
The child was in the back of a vehicle that was attacked while driving through this neighborhood around 11:30 p.m. He died after being evacuated to the University Hospital of Nimes. The wounded is the driver, his uncle. Another child who was also behind the vehicle was unharmed in the shooting.
The Pissevin neighborhood is the same one where a 39-year-old man was shot dead in January, in events within the framework of the gang struggle for control of drug trafficking. According to figures from the former Nimes prosecutor, Eric Maurel, around fifteen settling of scores caused eight deaths in Nimes in 2020 and three in 2021, most of them in the districts of Pissevin, Chemin Bas and Mas de Mingue, three suburbs of Nîmes.
Pissevin, like the districts of Chemin Bas and Mas de Mingue, was born in the 1960s to house populations from the rural exodus, returnees from North Africa and, later, immigrant workers. All three share alarming socioeconomic indicators with a poverty rate that reaches up to 70% and massive unemployment.
"These murders are directly related to drug trafficking in the context of territorial wars or conflicts between gangs," said Eric Maurel, who distinguished between "impulsive actions" and others of a "very organized" nature.
"We are in the presence of sometimes very young people who have access to weapons of war", in particular to assault rifles of the Kalashnikov AK-47 or M-16 type", stressed the magistrate, considering that Nimes had almost become " drug shopping center": every week some 700 kilos of cannabis resin, mainly from the Maghreb, and dozens of kilos of cocaine from South America passing through Spain pass through to be resold, especially along the Rhône corridor, he explained. .
