YouTube
Rioting and protests broke in Aulnay-sous-Bois, France last night after a French policeman was accused of sexually assaulting a black youth worker with a baton.
The victim, identified as a 22-year-old man named Theo, was arrested on Thursday in the ‘3000 estate’, a northeast suburb of Paris, after officers stopped a group of about a dozen people on suspicion of drug dealing.
During the operation the officers ‘attempted to arrest a 22-year-old man’, and when he resisted, used tear gas and ‘one of them used an expandable baton’, according to the prosecutor’s office.
But the man suffered such serious injuries to his rectum that he needed major emergency surgery. According to France24, the examining doctor said he had suffered ‘a longitudinal wound in the anal canal’ and ‘a section of the sphincter muscle’. He remains in hospital on 60-day medical leave.
YouTube
A cropped video of the assault at what appears to be a higher vantage point has since been posted online. The footage of the alleged rape has been edited out.
Theo said in a recording of his account of events to his lawyer that during the ‘violent’ identity check, a policeman tore his bag and proceeded to beat him.
He said:
I didn’t try to run away. I told the officers: ‘You’ve torn my bag’, to which they replied that they didn’t give a damn. They all tried to grab me. I asked them why they were doing this, but they just continued to throw insults at me.
He told me to put my hands behind my back. They put handcuffs on me and then they told me to sit down. They sprayed tear gas in my face and then I had an ephemeral pain in my buttocks. My trousers were lowered. I was in serious pain.
This is a horrific, violent, racist, sexual violence by French police against a black man. #JusticePourTheo https://t.co/Xchm0htLAO
— <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.2.1/72x72/1f343.png" alt="