He lived with about twenty dogs in a house bombed. A 46-year-old man was arrested by the GIGN elite gendarmes on Tuesday, October 11, in the village of Carnas (Gard). According to information from franceinfo and France Bleu Gard Lozère, the latter had been spotted for having ordered products online that could be used to manufacture explosives.
If he had, according to a source close to the investigation, the “perfect survivalist kit”, with around forty homemade traps, explosives, handguns, iodine tablets, surveillance cameras around his house, a judicial source still wonders with franceinfo about his true profile. Was he a true survivalist or someone hostile to law enforcement? In September 2021, he was given a nine-month suspended prison sentence for having exhibited a rifle in front of the gendarmes.
The suspect will not be heard again by the gendarmes when his condition allows it. His police custody was suspended so that he could be hospitalized. A psychiatric expertise must now define whether there has been an alteration or abolition of discernment, and whether or not he is therefore responsible for his actions.
A house bombed with explosives
This Tuesday, when the gendarmes came to arrest him in this Cévennes hamlet of about ten houses, the GIGN “trapping” dog detected around forty explosives. Not all of them were active, some worked for example with a fuse, but others could be triggered by a mechanical ignition system, either with fishing line or from the house alarm system. The 40-year-old had hijacked this system so that the motion detector activated traps, some of which were very dangerous and contained steel balls.
The gendarmes had to take every precaution to intervene even in the house, whose door was also trapped. During the search, they found three handguns, including a dummy, on the suspect as well as three long guns, shotguns, in the house. The investigation initially opened for orders for products that can be used to manufacture explosives has been extended to “possession of weapons” by the Alès prosecutor’s office.