Marseille’s long-running drug turf wars are under a renewed spotlight after a 14-year-old boy was allegedly hired as a hitman via social media and promised €50,000 (£42,000) by a prisoner to carry out a revenge killing.
The teenager is alleged to have been recruited by the 23-year-old inmate who later called the police from his prison cell to report the boy after he allegedly shot dead a 36-year-old man.
An investigation has been opened into alleged murder and conspiracy to murder by a criminal gang. Police are trying to determine why the prisoner reported his own alleged recruit to police.
The Marseille prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone, described the latest incident as “unprecedented savagery” in a press conference on Sunday, saying two recent crimes involving teenagers showed that drug turf wars were dragging in the “ultra-young”, who were being enlisted by gangs to carry out increasingly violent crimes. He said there was a “complete loss of bearings” with teenagers involved in crimes.
On Friday, a 36-year-old taxi driver from the firm Bolt, who was well-known in Marseille as an amateur footballer, was found shot dead by a bullet to the head in his car not far from the city’s main train station. He was described by the prosecutor as having nothing to do with the drugs trade in the Mediterranean port city and although he was “coldly shot” in the back of the head, he was not believed to have been the intended target.
Bessone said: “[The prisoner] recruited a 14-year-old minor from Vaucluse and organised the logistics for him to be collected by car and brought to a hotel room in Marseille. The young boy was carrying his own 357 Magnum revolver”.
The boy allegedly had been instructed to carrying out a shooting and was told to travel by car. He asked the driver to wait, and when he refused the boy shot him in the back of the head, authorities said.
The 14-year-old then allegedly fled the scene and hid nearby, calling his contacts and asking them to come and get him. But instead, the prisoner who had ordered the killing called police to report the boy, giving them his exact location, the prosecutor said. The boy was arrested and was being questioned.
Bessone said the exact reason for the jailed man calling the police, and saying he was acting for a drug gang, remained to be determined. The prisoner went before a judge on Sunday and was charged in the case.
The prosecutor said the 14-year-old boy was hired to carry out a revenge killing over the death of a 15-year-old boy last Wednesday.
The same prisoner had last week contacted a 15-year-old boy online saying he would pay him €2,000 to intimidate a competitor from a rival drugs gang by setting fire to his door. The boy was tasked with shooting at the man’s door and setting it alight.
But the teenager was spotted by members of a rival gang who the prosecutor said “stabbed him 50 times” then set him on fire, killing him. The 14-year-old boy was then allegedly hired online a few days later to avenge that killing.
Marseille, France’s second-largest city, is also one of the poorest in France and is plagued by drug-related violence, which the president, Emmanuel Macron, pledged this year to stamp out. The city has in recent years witnessed a turf war for control of the highly profitable drug market between various clans. Bessone said victims and perpetrators of such violence were getting increasingly younger.
The two latest deaths mean that the number of drug-related killings in Marseille has risen to 17 since the start of the year. Forty-nine people were killed in drug related violence in the city in 2023.
