Jérôme Rodrigues: no projectile was launched before the grenade throw

En complément de l’enquête sur les circonstances de l’éborgnement de Jérôme Rodrigues, INDEX publie une analyse détaillée des vidéos de l’incident dans les instants qui précèdent le lancer de la grenade de désencerclement. Contrairement à ce qu’affirme la défense du policier mis en cause, les projectiles visibles dans les vidéos de la scène sont tous postérieurs au lancer de la grenade. Celle-ci n’a donc pas été lancée “en riposte” à des projectiles.

A week ago, INDEX published a video investigation on the circumstances of the mutilation of Jérôme Rodrigues. In this investigation, we demonstrated that when officer Brice C. threw a de-encirclement grenade in the middle of the group where Jérôme Rodrigues was positioned, the police officers of his unit were not under “a rain of projectiles”, as the agent said during the hearings. The footage shot by the policemen’s body cameras clearly establish that the group of demonstrators targeted by the grenade was not a hostile group and presented no danger.

Nevertheless, for four years, the police officer who threw the grenade has maintained his statements and justified his action as “self-defense”. Heard during the course of the investigation by the French authorities, at least eleven other police officers have testified in favour of their colleague Brice C. and supported his version of the facts: projectiles would have hit the group of police officers, to the point of forcing them to “fight back”.

Even today, the judicial investigation of the case seems to come up against the question of the projectiles of which the group of police officers would have been the target – or not – at the time of the facts. In order to support its argument, the defense of officer Brice C. presented to the investigating judge still frames taken from videos of the incident where it is possible to identify projectiles in the air: according to Brice C.’s lawyer, the use of these images would be “of capital importance, in that it confirms, definitively, the version of Brice C. already confirmed by all the police officers interviewed”.

Given the decisive nature of the topic of projectiles for the legal outcome of the case concerning Jérôme Rodrigues’ mutilation, INDEX carried out an image-by-image analysis of all the available videos. Our objective was to identify possible projectiles having reached the group of police officers in the moments preceding the throwing of a de-encircling hand grenade. For a better understanding, we present this analysis in video format.

At the end of this analysis, we have not identified any projectile that would have reached the group of police officers in the seven seconds preceding the throwing of the de-encirclement grenade.

The few photograms of the scene where it is possible to identify projectiles in flight are all subsequent to the moment when the grenade was thrown.

The argument that the actions of police officer Brice C. constituted a response to projectiles being thrown at him and his unit is therefore invalidated by the rigorous analysis of the available footage.