A violent act by a French police officer against a man during pension reform protests in France led to the victim having a testicle amputated.
Images and videos from Thursday’s demonstrations circulating online show a police officer slapping the legs of a man lying on the ground holding a camera.
Lawyer Lucie Simon said the man, a 26-year-old French-Spanish engineer who took pictures of the protest, had decided to press charges for “voluntary violence by a person of public authority, which led to the mutilation”.
“It was such a blow that he had to amputate a testicle,” she said, adding that the engineer was still in hospital.
“This is not a case of self-defense or necessity. The evidence is in the footage we have and the fact that the victim has not been arrested.”
The engineer, who lives on the French island of Guadeloupe, “is still in shock and keeps asking why” the incident happened, the lawyer added.
Paris police said it had launched an internal investigation and stressed that the incident had taken place “in a context of extreme violence and as part of a police maneuver to arrest violent individuals”.
Government spokesman Olivier Veran told broadcaster BFMTV that he felt “empathy” for the young man, but stressed “the need to understand the circumstances in which this intervention took place”.
The interior ministry announced that 80,000 people demonstrated in Paris on Thursday as part of nationwide protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64.
However, the far-left CGT union said it counted 400,000 protesters in the streets of the French capital.
Around the Bastille district of Paris, some protesters threw bottles, containers and smoke grenades at police, who responded with tear gas to disperse the protesters, according to AFP journalists on the scene.
Source: DN
