Two grisly killings involving teenagers have shaken the French city of Marseille, which has long battled organised crime and drug-related violence.
Last week, a 14-year-old murdered a taxi driver during a botched revenge mission for the brutal killing of a 15-year-old.
Marseille prosecutor Nicolas Bessone has warned that the city’s drug lords were recruiting young boys to kill “without any remorse or reflection”.
During a press conference on Sunday, Mr Bessone described the “unprecedented savagery” of the 15-year-old’s murder linked to a feud between two gangs known as the “DZ Mafia” and the “Blacks”.
According to prosecutors, a member of the DZ Mafia, who is currently in prison, hired the boy for €2,000 ($2,192; £1,676) to “intimidate” a competitor by setting fire to his door.
The teenager was spotted and searched by rivals from the Blacks gang, who then stabbed him and set him on fire after finding a gun.
“He was stabbed 50 times and taken to the Fonscolombes housing estate, where he was burned alive,” said Mr Bessone. A friend, also aged 15, managed to escape.
The DZ Mafia member in jail then hired a 14-year-old via social media to exact revenge two days later, promising to pay him €50,000 ($55,000; £42,000).
However, the boy shot dead taxi driver Nessim Ramdane, 36, before reaching his target because the driver refused to wait while he carried out his mission, Mr Bessone said.
The prisoner who had hired the teenager then phoned the police to turn him in. The minor was taken into custody and admitted shooting the driver, but insisted that the shot had “gone off accidentally”.
Franck Rastoul, a public prosecutor at the Aix-en-Provence court of appeal, has warned of the scourge of drug-related violence, saying that young people were “intoxicated by easy drug money” to the point of “total disregard for human life”.
Young people are also often victims of the drug trade.
In 2021, the BBC reported a 14-year-old boy was shot dead by a young man on a scooter outside the Les Marronniers housing estate in northern Marseille. Two other boys – aged 14 and eight – were wounded.
In March this year French police staged a major operation to seize drug money and weapons in Marseille.
Authorities said that within a few weeks, they made 627 arrests, recovered 450kg of cannabis and 19 weapons, as well as €1.6m ($17.5m; £1.3m) in cash.
The two latest murders mean that the number of drug-related killings in Marseille has risen to 17 since the start of 2024.