A man in the southern French city of Marseille is just the latest victim of fatal gun violence as the city continues to see gang violence carried out by those wielding illegally owned Kalashnikov-type rifles.
The fatal shooting took place on Sunday afternoon in front of a bakery in the 14th district of the city, as the victim, a 40-year man, was heading to the bakery where he worked.
The shooting was carried out by a group of two to three people armed with a Kalashnikov rifle according to witnesses, who fled the scene in a Peugeot 308 car, which was later found set on fire just a few hundred metres from where the shooting took place, newspaper Le Provence reports.
According to the newspaper, the 40-year-old victim was already well-known to the police and the judicial system and had been involved in several criminal cases in the past. The French judicial police have taken over the investigation into the shooting, which is currently believed to have been related to a settling of scores in the Marseille criminal underworld.
The shooting is just the latest in the city said to involve a Kalashnikov-type rifle, which is largely illegal to purchase and own in France and yet are smuggled into the country in apparently considerably numbers. It comes just months after an incident in May that forced a nursery in the city to close after rifle fire erupted outside while around sixty children were present.
Employees of the nursery described the scene and the terrified children, with one employee saying, “There are children who have locked themselves in the toilet and said, ‘Tata, I don’t want to go out, I’m scared.'”
On some occasions, it is not just gang criminals targetting each other with Kalashnikov rifles. In October of last year, police in the 15th district of the city were met with a hail of gunfire while attempting to conduct an anti-drug operation in the area and were forced to throw themselves on the ground to avoid bullets.
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