Aged 26 and from Annecy, he had been hospitalized, while the passenger, a 20-year-old Lyonnais, had been killed instantly during this check where, according to the prosecution, the two police officers would have acted in “legitimate defense”.

The police custody of two officials was lifted on Friday, the Lyon prosecutor’s office announced on Friday evening. It took place “as part of the investigation entrusted to the IGPN and opened into the heads of voluntary violence by persons holding public authority which resulted in death without the intention of giving it”.

While the first elements “seem to corroborate the hypothesis of self-defense”, additional investigations will however “confirm the exact circumstances in which the police used their weapons”, the prosecution continued on Friday, announcing that it had decided to open a judicial inquiry on the same counts.

The driver’s criminal record bears the mention of nine convictions and he is being searched for “aggravated theft” of vehicles, according to the same source.

His passenger was known to the police but his criminal record does not mention any conviction, said the prosecution.

Around 00:05 on the night of Thursday to Friday in Vénissieux, a sensitive town very close to Lyon, four police officers on night patrol spotted a reported stolen vehicle parked in the parking lot of a shopping center.

“As the police were preparing to check the car, the driver engaged reverse gear then forward gear, hitting a police officer who was thrown onto the bonnet of the vehicle,” according to a first press release from the prosecution.

“The car continued to progress and two police officers, including the one positioned on the bonnet, used their weapon several times”, he said, and “the car ended its race a hundred meters further”.

The police officer struck was slightly injured in the legs and examined at the hospital, according to the prosecution.

Two sections of the CRS8, an elite unit of the national police, forty men, also arrived as reinforcements in Vénissieux on Friday evening, according to the police.

On a visit to Corsica, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin on Friday gave his “a priori support” to “all the police and gendarmes in France who face refusals to comply every day since there is one. every half hour in our country”.