Police Shoot Undocumented Individual in Nice:
The Killing of Omar Elkhouli
On the night of June 14, 2022, Italian police flagged a refrigerated van
carrying five undocumented individuals near Ventimiglia. The French police
were notified and attempted to stop the vehicle at a checkpoint near Sospel.
The vehicle, driven by two smugglers, did not stop, causing French border
police (PAF) to pick up the chase. The van passed another police checkpoint
and again refused to obey orders to stop. At this time, four bullets were
fired at the moving vehicle. The van made it to Nice, where it was abandoned
by the drivers, leaving the five passengers locked in the refrigerated
compartment. When police arrived and opened the van, one of the men, Omar
Elkhouli, was discovered shot in the back of the head. According to another
passenger, “Police officers were kicking (Elkhouli) to see if he reacted… It
took them 15 minutes to take care of him.” Elkhouli was eventually taken to
hospital, where he died due to injuries on June 15, 2022.
In response to
this, Nice procureur Xavier Bonhomme announced on Twitter that two inquiries
had been launched: the first to track down the alleged smugglers for not
complying with police and facilitating the entry and circulation of aliens
in irregular situations into France, and the second into the officer who
fired his weapon at the van.
The inquiry into homicide was referred to
l’Inspection Générale de la Police National (IGPN), as is customary in cases
involving the use of arms by a police officer. Following the death of
Elkhouli, the Mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, released a statement on
Twitter in which he proclaimed, “Of course, I deplore the injuries caused…
but they are the result of a criminal act that had to be stopped for the
safety of our police and gendarmes and to avoid other tragedies.” The
entirety of this statement can be found on Twitter @cestrosi.
Who was Omar
Elkhouli?
Omar Elkhouli was 35-years-old and originally from Egypt. Contrary
to early reporting on this case, he was not a migrant attempting to enter
France from Italy. A comprehensive MediaPart investigation into Elkhouli
established that he had been living without papers in Paris for 13 years.
Elkhouli was highly involved in his community and regularly visited two
elderly neighbors. Ibrahim, a friend of Elkhouli, described to MediaPart how
“[Elkhouli] even had the keys to the apartment of one of them and her kids
would call him for news of their mother.”
Based on accounts from his friends
acquired through the Mediapart investigation, Elkhouli felt he had no chance
of obtaining a residence permit in France. One of Elkhouli’s friends has
been trying and failing to get an appointment with a French prefecture to
renew a residence permit for three years, despite having more than 40
payslips from years of registered work. Elkhouli worked construction without
a contract, and thus had no way to prove he had been living and working in
France for over a decade. His only chance of obtaining a residence permit
was by acquiring fake documents from Italy and appealing to the Italian
prefecture. Elkhouli is not the only undocumented French resident who had to
resort to obtaining forged papers.
Many migrants, unable to legally prove
their eligibility for residence permits, seek out fake documents to support
their residency requests. These false supporting documents are often
acquired in Italy. Elkhouli was pursuing a residence permit to visit Egypt.
Having spent thirteen years working and living in France, he wanted to see
his friends and family again. Elkhouli went to Italy some days prior to June
14, 2022. He acquired false documents and an appointment with the Italian
prefecture. At the time of his departure from Italy, Elkhouli’s request for
a residence permit was being processed. He had planned to leave Italy on
June 14, 2022, as he had to return to work. However, on the 14th, he
discovered that there were no train routes that would be able to get him to
Paris from Ventimiglia.
MediaPart reported that Elkhouli was approached by a
smuggler who offered to help him cross into France in the back of a
refrigerated van. Elkhouli was informed that he would need to pay 50 euros
to the man who approached him with this offer and 200 euros more to the men
driving the van across the border.
The Night of the Incident
At 00:05, Elkhouli and four other undocumented persons departed from Ventimiglia in
the back of a refrigerated truck. After 15 minutes, Italian police began to
pursue the vehicle, and the drivers accelerated to evade law enforcement,
despite protestation from the passengers. French border police were notified
of its presence as the van crossed into French territory. Yet, the van
refused to stop at two police checkpoints, the first in Sospel and the
second in Cantaron.
According to police accounts, the vehicle accelerated in
their direction at this second checkpoint, prompting one officer to fire his
weapon four times. One bullet pierced the front of the van at the level of
the headlights, while a second bullet hit above the rear tire and entered
the refrigerator compartment. Elkhouli was shot in the back of the head by
this bullet. One of the other passengers stated in an interview with
MediaPart, “we banged on the dividing wall screaming that one of us had a
head injury, but [the smugglers] kept accelerating.”
The vehicle arrived in
Nice at about 2 a.m., at which point the smugglers left the vehicle and fled
the scene. Elkhouli and another passenger were brought to the hospital while
the police took the other men to the police station. The second man brought
to the hospital had his clothes taken and, upon being discharged, was
brought to the police station in only his boxers; no new clothes were
provided for him. MediaPart reported that the police interrogated these men,
some of whom were in shock, for hours without giving them water or food.
After the interrogation, the men were placed in a detention center and
ordered to leave French territory.
The other passengers were allowed to
leave the detention center on June 20, 2022, with the help of Zia Oloumi, a
Nice lawyer. He fought to have them released due to their particular
vulnerability and physiological state after witnessing the death of
Elkhouli.
After being released, two of the men launched a complaint against
the police officer who fired his weapon at the refrigerated vehicle. When
MediaPart reported on this case in July, both official inquiries into this
situation were open. The Menton Times contacted numerous journalists and a
local activist group to ask for updates on this case, but currently, no new
information is available.
An uptake in Police Violence
The shooting of Omar
Elkhouli is just one of a string of recent cases of police violence in
France. On Sept. 7, another fatal shooting occurred in Nice. The victim was
a 24-year-old Tunisian man, who police allege was driving a stolen vehicle
and refusing to obey an order to stop.
A video circulating on social media
shows an officer firing his gun towards the car’s windshield as it backs
away from him. On the same day, a 22-year-old woman was fatally shot by
Police in Rennes during an anti-drug operation. A report from the IGPN
published in 2021 found that the frequency of officers “firing at vehicles
in motion” has increased from an average of 119.2 instances annually from
2012-2016 to an average of 165.8 from 2017-2021. This is a statistically
significant increase of approximately 39% from 2012 to 2016.
According to
Christian Mouhanna, a researcher from France’s National Center for
Scientific Research and an expert on police issues, legal changes made in
2017 are to blame for the recent increase in police violence. After a series
of terror attacks between 2015 and 2016, French laws concerning when police
officers can shoot their weapons changed from strictly in cases of
self-defense to “in cases of absolute necessity and in a strictly
proportionate manner.” Mouhanna asserts that many police have interpreted
this statute to mean a vehicle can be shot at if refusing to comply with
orders.