Teen Loses Eye in Police Shooting During France Protests, Family Files Complaint

The young man thought he had been hit by a mortar, as the police would have told the rescuers. "But at the hospital, the doctors told me it was because of a flashball shot," he confides to Street Press. Jalil and his parents filed a complaint with the IGPN, convinced that the young man was hit by a police weapon. "It hit the brain. Two centimeters away, I could have lost my life. I never had hatred against the police. It’s more the policeman who shot me that I hate," he recounts.

"They broke him," says his father, Mohammed M., shocked and outraged that his son "had no right to go out," given that there was a "curfew from 9 pm" imposed by the mayor of the city, Rafika Rezgui. The young man had joined a friend, Place de la Libération, around 10:30 pm that day. "We were about ten, we were like in a line. Someone bigger than me lights a mortar and starts aiming at the CRS. I was next to him and in a second, I realize I’m all alone on this line. It happened like in the movies: I heard a boom," he recounts. After that, it’s a blank. Jalil no longer remembers exactly what happened.

"I have flashes, as if I had lost consciousness and woke up 20 meters away running. I couldn’t feel anything anymore," he continues, specifying that he left the scene staggering "as if he was drunk" and was chased by the police, one of whom would have shot him. Transferred by the firefighters to the hospital in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges "for head and maxillofacial trauma following mortar fire (received in the face) from the CRS," he was then admitted to the pediatric neurosurgery department of the Rothschild Hospital in Paris.

From 1 pm, Jalil comes out of the operating room at 7 pm. "They told me I had a lot of blood in my brain, that my eye had exploded." Heard by the IGPN on July 6, while he was still in the intensive care unit, the young man claims to be able to identify the author(s) of the flashball shot. Jalil has already left the hospital and is following treatment at home to prevent the wound from becoming infected. In September, he should get an ocular prosthesis. "I have migraines all the time. I can’t sleep at night anymore," complains the minor who can no longer "play football, or video games." Out of school for almost a year, he fears for his future.

https://youtu.be/w3Yb59uXxIM