Violence and settling of scores continue in the slums of the coastal city of Marseille, France, where three people have been killed in a shooting involving machine guns.
Shortly after five o’clock in the morning, unidentified persons in a car fired Kalashnikov rifles at another car carrying five young men, no more than 25 years old, in a residential area in the 11th arrondissement, east of Marseille.
Bouches-du-Rhône police and firefighters announced that three of them were killed on the spot, while two passengers managed to escape, and the attackers left in their cars, which were found burned shortly after, a usual method in settling scores between drug trafficking gangs.
The neighborhood where the shooting took place did not contain any smuggling points, according to the police, but the men targeted in this operation were known in the security records and lived in “Felix Piat” in the third district, which is heavily affected by the drug trade.
“All police services are on alert to find the perpetrators of these heinous crimes and to dismantle the networks of traffickers responsible for all this violence,” said Frédéric Camerie, Bouches-du-Rhône Police Chief, who went to the scene.
And she stressed that “this battle continues with determination,” stressing that “during the past weekend alone, five people were arrested in possession of weapons related to drug trafficking, and three Kalashnikov rifles, a machine gun and a pistol were seized.”
So far, 21 people have been shot dead since the beginning of the year in the major city in southern France, which is known for its high crime rate related to drug trafficking, and the victims are often young men or teenagers, who are at the bottom of the smuggling ladder or small sellers, who are targeted by killers from rival gangs.
Special units were deployed to combat crime, such as the “CRS 8” unit, but this did not prevent new deaths from machine guns.
