Some of the young men charged over the fatal stabbing of 16-year-old Thomas Perotto at a village ball in Crépol were members of a Snapchat conversation of about 60 people in which anti-French and anti-Semitic abuse circulated, Le Figaro has reported, even as the Valence prosecutor continues to argue that a racist motive is not made out.
The newspaper’s account, published on August 27, draws on digital material and interrogations that investigating judges used when they added, in July, an aggravating circumstance of racism aimed at “the white race and the French nation”. The judges set that out in a second notice of the end of their inquiry, dated July 20.
The public prosecutor’s office in Valence has twice declined to follow that reading. Its complementary submission of August 17 treated anti-white and anti-French remarks in witness statements as too few, too vague and too hard to pin on named suspects. The office called such accounts very much in the minority, imprecise and at times contradictory, and said no witness could attribute the words to any one of the accused.
Perotto, a rugby player, was stabbed twice in the chest and the flank in the early hours of November 19, 2023 outside the village hall in Crépol, in the Drôme, southeast France, and died as he was being driven to hospital.
A fight broke out after a winter ball between local youths and a group of youths with a migrant background largely from the La Monnaie estate in nearby Romans-sur-Isère who apparently came to cause trouble. Some 400 people had attended the ball in the village of about 500 residents.
Fourteen people of the attacking group remain under formal investigation for murder and attempted murder. Sixteen other people were injured that night, two of them seriously. No defendant has admitted delivering the fatal blows; investigators have described a code of silence.
Valence public prosecutor Laurent de Caigny closed his case on June 11 with a 290-page submission asking for 11 of the 14 to stand trial and dropping the charge of murder by an organised gang, which cut the maximum sentence from life to 30 years. There are 57 civil parties.
Le Figaro says digital traces cut against the suspects’ later claim that talk of “the French” was harmless estate slang.
In messages sent hours after the group fled Crépol, a minor in the circle discussed a friend injured by a stray knife blow: He thought “Yano” had meant to “charcler”, or slash, “a Frenchman” and had hit one of their own by mistake.
On July 17 the judges put that language to the accused when they warned them that a racist aggravating factor might be added. The accused had been notified of that possibility five days earlier.
Almost all denied saying or hearing racist threats. One acknowledged hearing “dirty white” and “dirty Frenchman”, and said rugby players had answered with slurs against Arabs.
One of the accused told the magistrate he felt addressed both by “Frenchman” and by anti-Arab insults and that he was “as French as everyone else”.
Others spoke of “inventing enemies”, of town versus village, or of “street language” in which “Français”, French, was said not to be pejorative.
Months later, after nine suspects were already in custody and five more were arrested on March 11, 2024, investigators identified four of the 14 accused in a Snapchat group of 62 participants.
Le Figaro quotes posts from that thread: “Jew country”; calls to “niquer (screw) la France, wallah”; exhortations to steal, sell drugs and “niquer” France; and a boast about “baiser la France” and leaving for Africa.
The posts also targeted Jews and the police. The paper does not attribute every line to a named defendant; it says the accused were in the conversation while such talk circulated.
Those messages sit beside what witnesses said on the night.
Early on, in a statement issued in November 2023, the prosecutor noted that nine of the 104 people then interviewed had heard hostility towards whites.
The investigating judges later relied on about 10 statements, including lines such as “we’re here to stab whites” and talk of killing French people.
Lawyers for the civil parties say that is specific enough.
Defence counsel have asked for the judges to be recused and for the racism count to be thrown out as both late and thin.
The prosecutor’s August paper sticks to the line the office has held since 2023, which claims that insults went both ways, only a minority of the statements mention anti-white or anti-French words, the wording shifts from witness to witness, and that the remarks cannot safely be pinned on named defendants.
The office would rather keep a different aggravating factor: That two others at the ball were also targets of attempted murder in the same burst of violence.
The indictment that will fix the charges for the Drôme assize court is due in September. The prosecution has asked for the case to go to the juvenile assize court, since some of the accused were minors when Perotto was killed, and a trial is not expected before the autumn of 2027.
Judges have now put “white race” and “French nation” on the file.
The prosecutor still says that falls short of the criminal test. If the Snapchat thread is before the court, the jury will have to decide whether hatred of “France” and “the French” in that group was swagger on a phone or genuine anti-white and anti-French racism.
