PARIS (Reuters) – A police officer is being investigated for homicide after shooting dead a 17-year-old on Tuesday morning in a Paris suburb after the youth failed to comply with an order to stop his car, the local prosecutor’s office said.
The officer fired on the car on Tuesday morning and the driver subsequently died from his wounds, the Nanterre prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
A video shared on social media, verified by Reuters, shows two police officers beside the car, a Mercedes AMG, with one shooting as the driver pulled away.
After a record 13 deaths from police shootings during traffic stops last year, this is the second fatal shooting in such circumstances in 2023.
Three people were killed by police shooting after refusing to comply with a traffic stop in 2021 and two in 2020. In a Reuters tally of fatal shootings in 2021 and 2022, the majority of victims were Black or of Arabic origin.
“As a mother from Nanterre, I have a feeling of insecurity for our children,” said Mornia Labssi, a local resident and anti-racism campaigner, who said she had spoken to the victim’s family, which she said was of Algerian origin.
One passenger was taken into police custody but later released while police were unable to contact another passenger, the prosecutor’s office said. The driver was “known to the judicial services for having refusing to comply with a traffic stop” on a previous occasion, it said.
Paris police did not immediately provide a comment on the case.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said in a Twitter post that the General Inspectorate of the National Police was investigating “to shed light on the circumstances of this drama.”
(This story has been refiled to fix a typographical error in paragraph 7)
(Reporting by Layli Foroudi, Juliette Jabkhiro, Dominique Vidalon; Editing by Conor Humphries)
