BAC shooting in Stains: 3D reconstruction contradicts the police account

16 August 2021, Stains, Seine-Saint-Denis. It was 1:32 am on Boulevard Maxime Gorki when a man sitting in his car filmed a scene of rare violence.

The resulting video lasts less than a minute. It shows two men in civilian clothes firing eight shots at a vehicle that is apparently trying to get away from them. The vehicle stops dead at the fifth shot.

Having put away his weapon, one of the two shooters opens the vehicle’s door. The driver – Nordine A., aged 37 – can be seen lying across the front seats. His body was riddled with bullets. He was hit in the back of the chest, the shoulder, the pubis, the right thigh, and the forearm. On his left side, one projectile came to rest beneath his collarbone, another in his trapezius, and a third in the upper part of his thigh. He suffered multiple fractures and severe internal bleeding.

A passenger was sitting in the back. Merryl B., aged 39, was shot in the middle of the back. Her spleen was ruptured, a lobe of her lung perforated, and she had multiple internal haemorrhages in her chest. The projectile lodged in her left breast.

The two men who opened fire were police officers from the Stains anti-crime unit (BAC): Jonathan F. and Valentin L. A third officer, Régis L., the patrol leader, took part in the operation without using his weapon.

In the hours that followed, the two wounded were treated by the emergency services in critical condition. Their lives were in danger. After several operations, Nordine A. and Merryl B. survived their injuries. But they were left with serious after-effects, some of them permanent.

A few hours after the events, the witness’s video was shared on Twitter by the account L’Écho des Banlieues. The tweet was deleted the same day; it had wrongly announced the driver’s death. But the video had already spread across social media.

A communications battle then began around the case, and the Paris police prefecture joined in. On its Twitter account, which has more than 500,000 followers, the prefecture’s spokesperson gave the official account of events on camera. She described a “refusal to stop for the police” (refus d’obtempérer), one police officer “struck” and another “dragged several metres” by the vehicle. Whereupon “both police officers used their service weapons.” In the days that followed, this account of events was widely repeated in the media. Two months later, a criminal complaint was filed against the Paris police prefecture for “spreading false news.”

What exactly happened that night in Stains? Did the driver of the vehicle actually commit the offence of refusing to stop for the police? Were the officers acting in self-defence when they fired? In this video investigation, Index reveals a detailed reconstruction of the incident, which contradicts the police account.

To carry out this investigation, Index used the witness’s video to produce a detailed 3D model of the scene. This model precisely locates the positions of each of the protagonists throughout the sequence that led to the shots being fired at Nordine A.’s vehicle. By cross-referencing the data obtained through 3D modelling with the information contained in the case file – which Index was able to consult – it is possible to establish that:

The police check behind the incident did not follow the rules, as the BAC officers were wearing no visible insignia identifying them as police officers. Consequently, when he manoeuvred to escape the individuals trying to immobilise him, the driver of the vehicle did not commit the offence of “refusing to stop for the police” as defined in Article L. 233-1 of the Highway Code.

There is no legal basis to justify the shots fired by officers Jonathan F. and Valentin L. Aside from the fact that they were not wearing their insignia when they used their weapons – a condition stipulated in Article L. 435-1 of the Internal Security Code – the 3D reconstruction of the incident contradicts the reasons given by the police officers to justify each of the shots they fired.

Officer Valentin L. put himself in danger by climbing onto Nordine A.’s vehicle and perching on the door, with his legs inside the cabin and his upper body outside the vehicle. It was only after this baffling and dangerous move that he was dragged several metres by Nordine A.’s vehicle as it reversed – a sequence that left him with only minor injuries to his legs.

None of the three police officers was struck by the vehicle.

On all eight occasions, at the moment they fired, neither the shooters nor the third officer was in the path of Nordine A.’s vehicle.

The last three shots fired by the police officers at the driver were fired while the vehicle was stationary and the driver was lying across the front seats.

More than a year after the events, the complaint they filed as civil parties against the BAC officers who shot them is still under judicial investigation.

Meanwhile, the criminal proceedings brought against Nordine A. – for refusing to stop for the police, aggravated assault, endangering the lives of others, and driving under the influence of alcohol – moved considerably faster.

One month after the events, on 17 September 2021, Nordine A. was brought before the Bobigny court for a fast-track trial and placed under judicial supervision. Initially scheduled for 19 November 2021, his trial took place on 18 February 2022. At its conclusion, Nordine A. was sentenced to the maximum penalty provided by law for refusing to stop for the police: two years in prison, none of it suspended, plus €15,000 in damages to be paid to the police officers who shot him and his partner. He was jailed immediately after the hearing.

Through his lawyer, Nordine A. appealed. He was released on 11 April 2022 on medical grounds. At his appeal hearing on 7 June 2022, the case was eventually adjourned to 11 October 2022.

If his conviction is upheld on appeal, Nordine A. could be sent back to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence.

So far, the justice system has cast Nordine A. as the aggressor and the police officers as the victims. Yet the case is not over. On 8 September 2022, the investigating judge in charge of the proceedings in which Nordine A. and Merryl B. are civil parties finally placed police officer Jonathan F. under formal investigation (mise en examen) for “assault with a weapon by a person vested with public authority.”

In 2017, the amendment of Article L. 435-1 of the Internal Security Code relaxed the conditions under which police officers may use their weapons, authorising them, under certain conditions, to fire at vehicles whose occupants are “liable, in the course of their flight, to cause harm to the officers’ lives or physical integrity or to those of others.”

Since then, the number of shots fired by the police at moving vehicles has risen sharply. According to figures from the IGPN, the police’s internal affairs body, +47% in 2017 compared with 2016, and +39% over a five-year average (2017–2021) compared with the previous five years (2012–2016).

Since the beginning of 2022, nine people have been killed by police officers firing at vehicles they were attempting to stop. In 2021, the toll was four deaths in similar circumstances. In 2020, police shots at moving vehicles caused one death.