The Paris prosecutor’s office announced on Monday, January 19, the opening of an investigation “to determine whether intentional violence by a person holding public authority caused the death” of El Hacen Diarra. The 35-year-old Mauritanian man died inside a police station of the 20th arrondissement of Paris, during the night of January 13 to 14, shortly after a violent arrest.
The opening of the investigation came after the “receipt of the first elements of the procedure and the final autopsy report,” stated the prosecutor’s office, specifying that it proceeds “systematically in this manner when a person dies in suspicious or unexplained circumstances in a place of deprivation of liberty.”
In this case, the medical examiner in charge of the autopsy concluded that the “death resulted from cardiocirculatory failure, in the context of massive tracheobronchial inhalation, the cause of which must be determined.” The examiner also observed, in addition to skin abrasions on the legs, a “deep, bleeding right frontotemporal wound measuring 1.5 cm × 0.2 cm.” Two days after the arrest, large bloodstains were still visible at the location where Diarra had been restrained and held on the ground by officers from a local police unit of the 20th arrondissement.
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