Panic in France as children fall victim to lethal violence of Marseille drug gangs

The number of teenagers involved in the drugs trade has quadrupled in eight years, the government says.

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A group of children spotted Adel's body on their way to school, just as his parents were heading to the police station to report him missing. A grotesque, charred silhouette, reclining, with one knee raised, as if lounging on one of Marseille's nearby beaches.

He was 15 when he died, in the usual way: a bullet in the head, then petrol poured over his slim corpse and set on fire.

Someone even filmed the scene on the beach, the latest in a grim series of shoot-then-burn murders linked to this port city's fast-evolving drug wars, increasingly fuelled by social media and now marked by chillingly random acts of violence and by the growing role of children, often coerced into the trade.

"It's chaos now," said a scrawny gang-member, lifting his shirt in a nearby park to show us a torso marked by the scars of at least four bullets - the result of an attempted assassination by a rival gang.