Warning: This article contains disturbing details from the start.
A group of children spotted Adel's body on their way to school, just as his parents were heading to the police station to report him missing. A grotesque, charred silhouette, reclining, with one knee raised, as if lounging on one of Marseille's nearby beaches.
He was 15 when he died, in the usual way: a bullet in the head, then petrol poured over his slim corpse and set on fire.
Someone even filmed the scene on the beach, the latest in a grim series of shoot-then-burn murders linked to this port city's fast-evolving drug wars, increasingly fueled by social media and now marked by chillingly random acts of violence and by the growing role of children, often coerced into the trade.
It's chaos now, said a scrawny gang-member, lifting his shirt in a nearby park to show us a torso marked by the scars of at least four bullets - the result of an attempted assassination by a rival gang.
France's Ministry of Justice estimates that the number of teenagers involved in the drugs trade has risen more than four-fold in the past eight years.
I've been in [a gang] since I was 15. But everything has changed now. The codes, the rules – there are no more rules. Nobody respects anything these days. The bosses start... to use youngsters. They pay them peanuts. And they end up killing others for no real reason. It's anarchy, all over town, said the man, now in his early 20s, who asked us to use his nickname, The Immortal.
Across Marseille, police, lawyers, politicians, and community organizers talk of a psychose – a state of collective trauma or panic – gripping parts of the city, as they debate whether to fight back with ever tougher police action or with fresh attempts to address entrenched poverty.
... [continued text describing the drug violence, community reactions, police activities, and political discussions surrounding the issue].
