Four men aged 19 to 21 allegedly kidnapped and tortured a 17-year-old boy because he reported drug dealers in the Paris no-go suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis to the police.
The teen is alleged to have been held against his will and tortured from Monday to Tuesday before police could arrest the four suspects.
According to a report from the newspaper Le Parisien, the teen asked his mother for €5,000 (£4,300/$6,000), claiming that he had been involved in a car accident and needed the cash for repairs.
He told his mother, who lives in the Yvelines district, that he would be coming to her home with several other people, who he owed the cash to. But the mother became suspicious about the affair and immediately notified the police.
A short time later, the teen, along with the four suspects, arrived at the woman’s home, which was being monitored by police. Upon their arrival, officers arrested the four men.
The teen then told the police that the group had kidnapped him because he had reported drug dealers from the no-go Seine-Saint-Denis area to the police. The teen, who had suffered injuries, was taken to a local hospital.
The Paris public prosecutor said the four were being investigated on charges of kidnapping, acts of torture, and attempted extortion.
The incident comes just months after another torture case in the Paris region. In March, a man in his 20s was brutally tortured over three days in the commune of Ivry-sur-Seine.
According to reports, the victim was given no food or drink, was slashed with a knife on his face and hands, and his captors intimidated him with an aggressive dog. The victim was able to escape when his captors were sleeping.
After police raided the apartment where the victim had been kept, they recovered cash and drugs, including cocaine.
In 2019, another teen, a 16-year-old in Marseille, was also tortured in relation to drug trafficking and received third-degree burns to his arms and genitals from a blow torch.