At trial of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray attack, Paris police prefecture on grill

Three police officers of the Intelligence Directorate testified, Tuesday, before the Special Assize Court on a note that would have been postdated on the day of the attack. A hearing to taste unfinished for civil parties.

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For an intelligence service, it is the absolute nightmare. Finding the Tribunal to have to tell in detail and public the processes of information, validation, explain to whom it is broadcast, why, when, how. As much asking Daft Punk to give a discovered face press conference … The secret is the first condition of their existence.

However, the exercise had to be delivered by the director and three current or elderly agents of the Intelligence Directorate of the Paris Police Prefecture (DRP). She discovered, they by videoconferencing and under pseudonyms, they testified, Tuesday 1 Er March, before the Assize Court specially composed of the Tribunal de Paris in order to lift the missing around the attack From Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray (Seine-Maritime), in which Father Jacques Hamel was killed in his church by two young jihadists and a parishioner, Guy Coponet, seriously injured, on July 26, 2016.

Everything started by the revelation, in Mediapart, in January 2018, of the existence of a DRPP note on Adel Kermiche, one of the two assassins of the priest of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray. This note, dated July 22, 2016, would have been postdated on July 26, the day of the attack, in order to camouflage the absence of transmission of critical information to the competent judicial and police services to prevent Kermiche, then at liberty conditional under electronic bracelet, to act with Abdel-Malik Petitjean.

Willingness to conceal

After each major bombing, the state services are reproached for “faults” allowing the commission of the attack. And that’s the case since each attack is “a failure”, as the director of the DRPP has recognized. But in the case of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, it is more serious: there would have been willingness to conceal. A preliminary investigation was conducted by the parquet in 2018 for “false” and “false use”. She was classified without a continuation after a DRPP IGPN investigation.

The information has provoked the comprehensible emotion of the civil parties, Father Hamel’s family, that of Guy Coponet and the diocese of Rouen and two associations of victims of terrorism. It is therefore upon request that five police officers of the DRPP have been summoned to testify. Four of them responded to the Assize Court with a medical certificate justifying a “psychological state” rendering them unfit to testify.

This announcement, on the first day of the trial, had caused a toer, so much on the side of the civil parties and of the defense, who saw it a “malabride”. The President then had decided to stay to rule. Finally, three out of five have come forward. The director of the DRPP, Françoise Bilancini, proposed to testify on his own. “To assume,” she explained. But the civil parties suspect it of wanting to lock an official “official” version. She took the direction of this service in 2017 and can not testify on the facts.

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/Media reports.