One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site.
Amine Kessaci, an activist engaged against narcotrafficking, lost a second brother to suspected criminal gangs in Marseille on Thursday.
The crime took place in broad daylight in the working-class neighbourhood of Saint-Just. "A motorbike pulled up beside the car of the victim, who had just parked. The backseat passenger on the motorbike shot the victim several times," Marseille prosecutor Nicolas Bessone said.
The murder of Medhi Kessaci, 20, could have been a “warning” to his activist brother Amine, said Bessone, though the investigation was still in its initial stages, he added.
Their older brother, Brahim, was murdered in 2020. His charred and dismembered body was found in a burning car, a common form of retribution among drug gangs, known as a “barbecue”.
“If the hypothesis of a murder of intimidation is confirmed, then yes, we have crossed a line, and not just any line,”Benoît Payan, the left-wing mayor of Marseille, told French television channel LCI, adding that it would be an “earthquake” and “a challenge to the State”.
In a recent interview with French website Konbini, Amine said he wanted to make sure that “his [older] brother didn’t die for nothing”. The son of Algerian immigrants, he began leading protests at the age of 17 through the heart of Marseille with other families.
The rallies sought to bring attention to the underserved, crime-ridden quartiers populaires of northern Marseille. Young men in black ski masks monitor checkpoints in Frais-Vallon, in Marseille’s 13th arrondissement, where Amine grew up. They watch who comes and goes and ensure the perpetuation of the drug trade.
With his soft voice and calm confidence, Amine came to symbolise the revolt against drug trafficking in Marseille. He founded nonprofit organisation Conscience to try and change the destiny of vulnerable youth from the projects. The group also provides judicial and psychological assistance to people who lost family members to the city’s rampant drug-related violence.
Read more‘Radicalised by crime’: Teen hitmen take Marseille’s grisly drug violence to new level
A pugnacious campaigner
Amine even confronted President Emmanuel Macron in September 2021 while the president was visiting the city to announce an urban project for Marseille.
“There is no point to come with a plan from Paris drafted on a plane or I don’t know where. You have to build it with us [. . .] the families of victims,” he told the president, who chose not to respond, instead asking him his age and then faintly applauding.
Amine maintained his combat over the years and sought to enter politics so that he could help implement the change he so desperately wanted to see. He ran in 2023 for a National Assembly seat as a candidate of the Green Party, part of the left-wing New Popular Front coalition. He lost by a small margin to a member of the far-right National Rally party.
"Politics has never extended a hand to me, so I decided to grab it by the throat," he wrote in his book "Marseille, essuie tes larmes: vivre et mourir en terre de narcotrafic" ("Marseille, wipe your tears: Living and dying in a land of narcotraffic") published last month.
As he campaigned, he sought to make people understand the reality of where he lived: "In certain cités (projects), it’s the dealers who run life: they let people enter buildings or keep them outside; they rummage through the medical bags of nurses when they come to treat elderly people; in the summer, they buy swimming pools for the residents. In other words, they organise life in the neighbourhood."
Outspoken and courageous, Amine inevitably entered the crosshairs of the people who had killed his older brother. The police placed him under protection in October. Yet it wouldn’t be enough to protect his entire family.
Two different paths, two different deaths
Fear is a blunt instrument, and the criminal gangs of Marseille know how to adapt their crimes. Medhi was served a perfunctory death. The gunman coldly shot four 9mm bullets into his chest while he was still in his car.
The youngest Kessaci son didn’t have anything to do with the criminal gangs, investigators say, and he aspired to become a policeman.
Brahim, on the other hand, was said to be linked to narcotrafficking. He thus suffered an intimate, ultra-violent death at the hands of the narcotraffickers: his body was handled, dismembered and transferred to the trunk of a car which was then set on fire.
Lawyer Karima Meziene, who represents relatives of those killed in drug-related score settling, was alarmed at what she described as "Italian mafia tactics".
"They're targeting a family to silence someone. It's going to scare a lot of people," she said.
Amine, as if having a premonition, told Konbini in October: “My older brother was aware of what he was doing, he was aware of the world he was falling into. The machine of narcotraffic [. . .] has this strength: when you put a finger in, a foot in, you are crushed, you are sucked into it.”
Octopus-like – its tentacles reaching far and wide – the world of narcotraffic didn’t spare his family, either.
(With AFP)