Nine members of a gang that descended upon a small French village to “stab white people” have been arrested after leaving one dead and 16 injured.
During a village winter ball in Crépol on Saturday evening, a gang of “outsiders” descended on the French village and went on a rampage that left a sixteen-year-old boy named Thomas dead and 16 others aged between 16 and 65 injured. The dance had seen around 300 of the 532 members of the village attend.
On Tuesday, the government announced per Le Figaro that it had arrested nine individuals in connection to the horrific attack on the. Reports have claimed that the band of young male attackers came from the La Monnaie neighborhood of Romans-sur-Crépol. The area has been associated with rampant issues involving drug trafficking and was the site of widespread unrest during the racially-inspired riots across France in July following the police shooting of an Algerian heritage teenager.
While police have yet to disclose any information about the backgrounds of the alleged attackers, Le Dauphiné Libéré newspaper reported that a young local man who was stabbed during the spree claimed that the knifemen pronounced their intent to specifically kill white people.
“We were having fun, we were among friends, having a good time together and a little towards the end, some people arrived. I heard that there was commotion outside, there was a crowd, I went out, I was stabbed in the shoulder and back, I saw my friend Thomas being stabbed, I was scared, I went back into the room,” he said.
“I saw another friend of mine get stuck in the back, I compressed his wound to make a tourniquet, he was hit in the kidney. It was horror. For me, it was clearly an attack. The attackers said: ‘We are here to stab white people’.”
A photograph shows part of the reception hall in Crepol, southeastern France on November 22, 2023, where Thomas, a teenager, passed away on November 19, 2023 after being wounded with a knife during a ball in the small village in the Drome region. (Photo by OLIVIER CHASSIGNOLE/AFP via Getty Images)
Politicians on the right have linked the attack to the impacts of mass migration in France. Former Reconquête presidential candidate Eric Zemmour described the attack as “francocide”, saying: “Their martyrs are repeat offenders. Our martyrs are innocent victims of the war of civilisation.”
Reconquête’s MEP candidate said in the wake of the attack that it represented an “ethnic war” and that her country is witnessing “the beginnings of civil war ”.
Maréchal went on to call for the government “to stop importing hundreds of thousands of people who hate France into our soil,” to “increase the number of prison places,” and to increase prison sentences.
In an interview with Valeurs Actuelles, former National Rally presidential candidate Marine Le Pen said that the attack demonstrates that “a new threshold has been crossed”.
“This tragedy corresponds to the feeling that many French people now feel: no one is safe anywhere anymore… We are witnessing an organized attack, emanating from a certain number of crime-ridden suburbs in which there are armed ‘militias’ carrying out raids,” she lamented.
Meanwhile, Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin said that France was experiencing a “wilding” and that there is a growing “bankruptcy of our society”.
The stabbing spree comes amid a wider recognition throughout Europe of the need to clamp down on mass migration and to begin removing migrants en masse, with neo-liberal French President Emmanuel Macron and leftist German Chancellor Olaf Scholz both vowing over the past month to enact large-scale deportation efforts.