A fatal police shooting in Paris has prompted a political row before this weekend’s French parliamentary elections, as the left attacked Emmanuel Macron over what it said were dangerous policing methods.
Police opened fire on a car in the 18th arrondissement of Paris on Saturday morning, injuring the driver and shooting dead one of the passengers, a 21-year woman, Rayana. Officers said the car failed to stop when summoned by them, and then allegedly drove towards them at speed.
But another woman, Inès, 21, who was in the back seat of the car, gave a different version of events on Wednesday, as Rayana’s family filed two legal complaints: one against the driver and oneat the police.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the radical leader of a new leftwing alliance challenging Macron’s centrists in the parliamentary elections, said France had a major policing problem and there must be change to “the doctrine governing the use of force by the police in our country”.
Mélenchon told a radio interviewer: “It’s not normal that we kill someone for failing to stop.” He said four people had died in such circumstances in four months, including two on the night of the presidential election in April.
“The police kill,” Mélenchon tweeted on Saturday, bringing condemnation from rival politicians and the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, ahead of the two-round parliamentary vote on 12 and 19 June.
“I find Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s way of systematically criticising the police with totally outrageous comments to be very shocking,” the prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, said on Tuesday.
The row comes after police were widely condemned by opposition politicians in France over their conduct at the Champions League final in Paris, where they teargassed football fans and were seen to fail to stop street crime against supporters.
The Greens’ Sandrine Rousseau, who is running for the left alliance in Paris, said the Paris shooting meant France must now ensure the police “kill no more”.
Inès, a trainee beautician who had been in the car in Paris, told the state broadcaster France Info: “I’m angry because the police could have acted differently.”
She said she and Rayana had been at a party early on Saturday morning, where they had met the driver and his friend for the first time, as they had friends in common. The two women did not have the right cash to get home, so the men had offered them a lift. Inès said that shortly after setting off, police officers on bikes knocked at the window because the driver was not wearing his seatbelt.
The driver did not wind down his window but accelerated, stopping a few metres away in traffic. Inès said he did not listen to the women begging him to stop, and appeared panicked, saying he did not have a licence.
She said the police had broken the glass of the windows with their weapons. “It was a very violent scene; they must have fired about 10 shots, it lasted a long time.”
Inès said the driver accelerated again, hitting a white van as she shouted at him to let them out. She thought Rayana had fainted. “I shouted her name several times, her body was limp,” she said. “Then I saw the blood on her neck.”
Inès said that with the heavy traffic, the driver could not have moved far. “The police did not have to shoot directly … especially shooting in the head,” she said.
The driver was injured by a bullet and was being treated in hospital.
Sylvie Noachovitch, lawyer for Rayana’s family, said the driver, by refusing to stop when the passengers were begging him to do so, had violated all rules of “prudence and security”, causing Rayana’s death. The family had filed a complaint against him and a separate complaint aimed at the police over “voluntary violence” leading to manslaughter.
“We don’t understand why 10 shots were fired in front of the passenger, why she was found with a bullet in her head,” Noachovitch told RTL radio. “From witness accounts, there had been no danger to the police at the moment they fired the shots. They can’t invoke legitimate defence.”
The three police officers, aged 23 to 30, were questioned and released this week. An investigation is ongoing. The officers’ lawyer, Laurent-Franck Liénard, described their actions as legitimate. He said Inès’s account bydid not fit “the objective elements of the case”.
