Resumption today of the trial of the bombing of Bouaké. On November 6, 2004, 10 people were killed in the attack on the French military camp in the Licorne force by two Soukhoï planes piloted by Russian mercenaries and their Ivorian co-pilots. The court began investigating one of the gray areas of this act: the arrest of suspects in Togo, which will finally be released because France, warned, is not following up. A section that returned Claude Taxis, at the time attaché for internal security at the Lomé embassy and head of the SCTIP delegation, the international police cooperation.
With our special correspondent at the courthouse in Paris, Laura Martel
The Commissioner said that François Boko, Togolese Minister of the Interior, on 10 November 2004, at 10 o’clock, informed him of the arrest that morning at the Togo-Ghana border of eight Belarusian citizens and two Côte d’Ivoire Ivorians and left him a copy of his passport. “The minister asked if we were interested in getting them back, because his intuition was that these individuals were likely to be the perpetrators of the attack,” said Claude Taxis. Doubts about the quality of the “agricultural techniques” displayed by these men are all the greater, Claude Taxis emphasizes that they were “received at the border by the secretary of Robert Montoya”, a former gendarme in the Élysée “who was in our sights for his arms sales activities”, the commissioner specified.
Around 11 o’clock he sends a fax to his Parisian hierarchy. “For lack of an answer, I called SCTIP around 4 pm and there I was told not to do anything,” he emphasizes. He then turned to the defense attaché and the information chief at the embassy. “But they themselves had been instructed not to do anything,” he said, just like the ambassador, it seems to me.
To the president who wants to know how far this information went, his then-superior, François Castro, also heard that “given the significance of the facts”, the information has “of course” been returned. by the police who “had to send to the Interior Minister’s office”. François Castro, who confirmed that he had given the order “not to intervene directly in the investigation”, because “it was not the role of SCTIP”: “The Ministry of the Interior was not directly interested, which concerned the Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs,” he said.
“Despite feedback via various channels to three ministries,” says Maître Béthune de Moro, “this important information has not been used. What do you think ? », The lawyer asks Claude Taxis. The Commissioner’s cryptic response: ‘I have no appraisal of what has been decided. But the business seemed very bad to me from the beginning and that was why I allowed myself to keep some notes, because I knew it could come to the surface ”.
Also readThe Bouaké deal (3/5) – French authorities let Belarusian pilots go
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