French anti-drug activist Amine Kessaci Wednesday vowed to continue denouncing the scourge of narcotics crime, even after his younger brother was killed in the southern city of Marseille.
Kessaci, 22, is a well-known campaigner in the port city struggling with drug crime, and last week’s killing has been seen as a warning over his activism, which he threw himself into after his half-brother was murdered in a drug-trafficking feud in 2020.
His younger brother Mehdi, 20, was killed on Thursday last week after an unknown gunman shot him dead in his parked car. The young man had no criminal record and wanted to be a police officer.
“No, I won’t be quiet,” Kessaci wrote in Le Monde newspaper on Wednesday, a day after burying Mehdi and in his first public comments since the killing
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez on Tuesday called the crime a “turning point”, and said President Emmanuel Macron had urged more action to address drug crime in France’s second-largest city.
Kessaci vowed to keep up his activism.
“I will speak of the violence of drug trafficking. Its grip. I will speak of the cowardice of those who order the crimes,” he wrote.
“I will speak of the shortcomings of the state, the flaws of the republic, the abandoned territories, and the obliterated populations,” he added.
Marseille has been struggling to battle drug crime, with more than a dozen people killed since the start of the year in turf wars and other disputes linked to cocaine and cannabis dealing.
Kessaci became an advocate for the families of victims of drug crime — as well as one demanding more opportunities for youth in Marseille’s impoverished northern districts — when his older sibling Brahim was killed in 2020 after falling into drug dealing.
“Faced with such an enemy, the state must grasp the gravity of the situation,” the law student and Greens party member wrote.
“It’s time to take action, for instance by bringing public services back to neighbourhoods, combating school failure that provides traffickers with a submissive workforce, equipping investigators and police forces with the resources they need, and genuinely supporting the families of victims of drug trafficking,” he said.
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