French police played role in death of black man in custody: report

An investigation into the death of a young black man in French custody has revealed that the tactics used to subdue him played a role in his death from heatstroke, according to a report seen by AFP on Monday.

The report, written by four Belgian doctors commissioned by examining magistrates, said the way officers pinned Adama Traore to the ground likely contributed to his death during a heat wave.

Traore, nicknamed the “French George Floyd” after the black American killed by American police in 2020, has become one of the faces of a growing campaign to end police brutality in France.

He died on July 19, 2016, at the age of 24, after fleeing officers who wanted to verify his identity card in Beaumont-sur-Oise, north of Paris. After a chase, he was found in an apartment where three police officers jumped on him to handcuff him.

One of the officers later said he complained about not being able to breathe – a confession which then drew comparisons to Floyd’s death in May 2020 in a strangulation in the US city of Minneapolis.

Traore was taken unconscious to a police station and left handcuffed to the ground in a recovery position, where emergency services pronounced him dead two hours after his arrest.

Although an initial autopsy revealed he died of asphyxiation, experts overturned this finding in May 2020, saying underlying heart disease and a genetic condition caused his death.

Believing his death to be the subject of a cover-up, Traore’s family demanded another opinion.

Belgian doctors said they believed he had “very likely suffered heat stroke”.

But “the role in the deadly process of a period of suffocation due to physical duress cannot be excluded,” they said.

They added that the “momentary containment maneuvers” and “to a lesser extent the underlying conditions” likely accelerated the deterioration of his condition.

The lawyer for the Traoré family, Yassine Bouzrou, was quoted by France France Info radio as saying he was satisfied with this discovery.

“We know today that among the causes of death is the violence of his arrest and his face-down confrontation, which clearly played an important role in the death of Adama Traore,” he said.

The report comes a week after the French government launched weeks of public consultations on ways to increase public confidence in the police following repeated scandals over racism and brutality.

In November, a video of Paris police beating and mistreating a black music producer in his studio shocked the country. Police were also recently caught on camera using violence to demolish a migrant camp in central Paris.

(AFP)