A prominent French anti-drugs campaigner whose brother was killed by drug 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.
After a ministerial meeting on drugs crime at the Elysée palace on Tuesday, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez stated: 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 drug criminals. In 2020, Brahim Kessaci, then 22, was found dead in a burnt-out car. This incident spurred Amine to launch his association, Conscience, aimed at exposing the damage caused by gang violence in working-class communities.
Marseille is notorious for its escalating drug wars, and Amine recently published a book titled 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 due to 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's murder has drawn national attention back to the overwhelming drug trafficking issues in France, with Senate member Étienne Blanc highlighting that the turnover for the drug trade in France is now €7bn (£6bn), approximately 70% of the justice ministry's budget. About 250,000 people are involved in the trade, surpassing the total police force in the country. Additionally, France has approximately 1.1 million cocaine users.
President Emmanuel Macron has responded to recent events by calling a special drugs summit and emphasizing the need for a revised strategy to combat drug trafficking. New laws aim to isolate senior drug convicts in prisons to disrupt gang operations. Officials have reported a decline in drug-related homicides in Marseille from 49 in 2023 to 24 in 2024, yet acknowledge that the battle against drug crime is far from over.
