Six men sentenced over two boys held captive by a Marseille drug gang
Six men have been handed sentences in France for what happened to two teenage boys who were held captive by a Marseille drug gang, according to BBC News.
The case dates to 2022, when a woman who had bought hashish on a Marseille housing estate was handed a note by the young seller. It read: "We're being held captive and need help. We are 15-years-old."
A French court heard that the seller was one of two boys who had first approached the gang seeking paid work. One of them was tasked with handling money, and the other worked the streets around the Frais-Vallon estate. The gang bosses accused the two boys of being responsible for "shortfalls" in takings.
The court was told that the boys suffered regular beatings and were forced to dance naked in front of a camera for blackmail. One of them was raped. Hours after the note was passed, the two teenagers tried to escape through a second-storey window and hurt themselves. One got away. The other was caught, beaten and stabbed, but survived.
Photos found on the phone of one of the boys' alleged torturers showed several other young men in similarly distressed condition.
The gang at the centre of the case is DZ Mafia. BBC News describes it as Marseille's most powerful gang, which emerged victorious from a bloody turf war and is now one of the most feared criminal organisations in France. Its founder, Mehdi Laribi, a French-Algerian, was detained earlier in 2026 in Algeria under a French arrest warrant. DZ is the official internet country code for Algeria.
According to Dimitri Zoulas, head of an anti-drug trafficking unit, the group rose to prominence in 2023 as the first French gang to release video statements and use social media to market itself as a brand. In July, the mayor of a nearby town was placed under police protection after intelligence suggested he was at risk of being targeted by DZ Mafia. The gang denied involvement in a video showing six masked men in black seated behind a table.
Wider figures cited in the coverage point to the scale of the problem. Zoulas said the number of cocaine users in France is expected soon to reach two million, up from 600,000 in 2017. He also put the value of drug smuggling across France at €7bn a year, involving 200,000 people. Official figures show more than 10,000 children were involved in drug trafficking in France during 2025. The government has said the number of teenagers involved in the drugs trade has quadrupled in eight years.
Marseille has been violent for some time. In 2024, a taxi driver in the city was killed by a 14-year-old, and a 15-year-old was stabbed to death in drug-related violence. A prosecutor at the time described Marseille as facing "savagery" after drug-related killings. A 2024 French Senate report described Marseille as the centre of the authorities' battle against a nationwide surge in cocaine use.
