A prominent French anti-drugs campaigner whose brother was killed by drugs criminals last week, five years after the murder of his elder brother, has vowed to stand up to intimidation and keep telling the truth about drugs violence.
Amine Kessaci, 22, was writing in Le Monde newspaper a day after the funeral of his younger brother Mehdi, whose murder last week has been described by the government as a turning-point in France's drugs wars.
Yesterday I lost my brother. Today I speak out, he wrote in his opinion piece.
[The drugs-traffickers] strike at us in order to break, to tame, to subdue. They want to wipe out any resistance, to break any free spirit, to kill in the egg any embryo of revolt.
Mehdi Kessaci, 20, was shot dead last Wednesday as he parked his car in central Marseille in what appears to have been a warning or punishment aimed at his older brother, Amine, from the city's drugs gangs.
Speaking after a ministerial meeting on drugs crime at the Elysée palace on Tuesday, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said: We all agreed that this premeditated murder was something totally new. It's clearly a crime of intimidation. It's a new level of violence.
Mehdi was the second Kessaci brother to be killed by drugs criminals. In 2020 the body of Brahim Kessaci, then 22, was found in a burnt-out car.
That murder prompted Amine to launch his association, Conscience, which aims to expose the damage to working-class communities caused by gangs.
Marseille is renowned for worsening drugs wars, and Amine Kessaci recently wrote a book called Marseille Wipe your Tears – Life and Death in a Land of Drugs.
In his Le Monde article, Amine revealed he was recently warned by police to leave Marseille because of threats to his life.
He attended his younger brother's funeral wearing a bullet-proof jacket and under heavy police protection.
I speak because I have no choice but to fight if I don't want to die. I speak because I know that silence is the refuge of our enemies, he wrote, urging courage from citizens, and action from the government.
Mehdi Kessaci's murder has brought the national spotlight back on a drugs trafficking problem that French experts and ministers agree is reaching almost unmanageable proportions.
According to Senate member Étienne Blanc, author of a recent study, turnover in the drugs trade in France is now €7bn (£6bn) – or 70% of the entire budget of the justice ministry.
He said around 250,000 people drew a living from the trade in France – more than the entire number of police and gendarmes, which is 230,000. According to Le Monde, the country counts 1.1 million users of cocaine.
President Emmanuel Macron, responding to these developments, initiated a special drugs summit aimed at reviewing the effectiveness of a recently passed anti-drugs law designed to combat the worsening crisis.
