Thursday, around 5 p.m., a police car violently hit a young man on a motorcycle following a chase near Place Rouppe.
Younès is barely 18 years old. Thursday afternoon, he was repairing his motorcycle before wanting to take a ride around the neighborhood to try it out.
He admits it, at this time, he’s not wearing a helmet or license plate, “it was just for a ride”. A trick that could have been fatal to him, a police car having spotted his offenses decides to follow him. “I never realized that they were following me, they hadn’t put on the sirenss “says Younès.
After going up avenue Stalingrad towards place Rouppe, he enters rue de Tournai and finds himself facing the van coming in the wrong direction, “I go left, they go left, and then I turn right, they go right”, and shock. Younès is propelled a few meters further.
The young man is taken by the police to the emergency room of the CHU Saint-Pierre. Verdict: a dislocated shoulder, a fractured arm, bruises and scrapes all over the body: “I can no longer bend my knees or bend my back.”
Younès says that, on the spot, the police wanted to proceed to his deposition as well as to ask him a few questions, but the doctor opposed it.
“Several died like this”
Monday afternoon, arm in a sling, Younès hangs out with his buddies who are doing some bodybuilding a stone’s throw from Place Anneessens. “I know it’s not right what I did. I recognize my wrongs, but that’s no reason to crush me. There are several who died like thata .” For him and his friends, the situation is ostensibly reminiscent of other cases where the police have hit young people in cars with a fatal outcome, as is the case for Sabrina and Ouassim, Mehdi or Adil.
Since Thursday evening, and following this event, the Anneessens-Lemonnier district has entered a negative spiral where tensions are increasingly exacerbated between young people, who express their anger, and the police who have “increased its presence in the neighborhood”. Tensions which reached their climax this Sunday, when nine people were arrested due to car fires, which Younès condemns: “they abused it.”
Since then, the young man and his friends say they have been subjected to constant checks by the police, who refuse to comment. “As soon as we are a small group, they check us and search us. Yesterday, they hit young people, they beat them to the ground and put a knee on their neck, like George Floyd, and then take them on board. Mine , they told me that I should have died.”