SerpApi.Org
A mayor in France was forced to flee his home in the night with the help of police protection following a threat of a car bomb from the country's top mafia group.
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said he took the decision to remove Alès mayor Christophe Rivenq after credible intelligence suggested an attack was imminent by members of the DZ Mafia.
The highly successful crime syndicate has taken over Marseille's drugs network and asserted its dominance on the city's streets through merciless contract killings, cementing its status as one of France's most feared and powerful gangs.
The threat comes after France's conservative interior minister last year declared that rampant drug-fuelled violence in France is turning the country into a 'Mexicanized narco-state'.
While gangland killings are increasingly common across France, attacks against elected officials are rare.
Originating in Marseille, about 160 kilometers south of Alès, Minister Nunez said: 'Alès is clearly a place where the DZ Mafia is trying to establish a foothold.'
Mayor Rivenq had already been threatened by the criminal group earlier this month, when 9mm bullets were found in his mailbox with a letter signed by them.
There was also threatening graffiti on the walls of his home, said France's National Prosecutor's Office for the Fight Against Organized Crime (PNACO).
PNACO, a recently created unit tasked with tackling the DZ Mafia and France's surging drug crime, said it had taken over the case from Marseille prosecutors.
DZ, short for Dzayer, meaning Algeria in the Berber language, has openly claimed violent attacks as their own since they first gained public and police attention for a gruesome murder in March 2023.
The gang posted pictures of the burning body of a victim in the Busserine housing estate in northern Marseille, proudly displaying their tag - DZ Mafia - alongside it. The gang's campaign of terror has continued since.
Just last month, the director of Marseille's Baumettes prison and one of her deputies had to be taken off duty and put under police protection after they received death threats, with a bounty of €120,000 placed on her head, according to French media.
The violent threats to Mayor Rivenq come as alarming Narco wars are being fought across France.
Teenagers and children have been shot, stabbed and burned alive, gang kingpins have broken out of custody, and cocaine is being washed up on beaches.
At the end of 2024, then-Interior Minister Retailleau declared war on the operating gangs, after a 15-year-old boy was caught in the crossfires and killed in a massive brawl and gunfight in Poitiers, on November 1.
The violence erupted in front of a restaurant and turned into a shootout involving up to 600 people.
'Narco scum today have no limits, this isn't happening in South America but in Rennes, in Poitiers, in parts of western France that once enjoyed a reputation for peace and quiet,' Retailleau said.
He spoke during a visit to Rennes, Brittany, where a five-year-old boy was left with critical injuries after being hit in the head by a stray bullet during a drug-related collision at the end of the preceding month.
But not even 24 hours after Retailleau left the city, a 19-year-old died after being fatally stabbed in the Maurepas neighbourhood, which police said is rife with drug crime.
Once mainly associated with Marseille, gun battles between drug gangs have become more frequent in Grenoble, and have even begun spreading out into cities including Poitiers, Clermont-Ferrand, Valence, and Villeurbanne.
In Valence, a 22-year-old man was shot dead and two others wounded as they queued outside a nightclub for a Halloween party on Thursday night; the following day an 18-year-old was gunned down and killed in a suburb of the same town.
In Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, a man was shot dead, and in Clermont-Ferrand a teenager is in a critical condition after receiving a bullet in the head.
Across the country, at least 16 hotspots of violence have been uncovered in recent years, from Nimes - where a 10-year-old boy was killed in suspected drugs violence in 2023 - to Paris, as shocking statistics of death and destruction emerge on an almost daily basis.
Read more
