In this first trial for “ultra-left terrorism” in France since the Direct Action group, 35 years ago, seven people are on trial starting Tuesday, and for 4 weeks, in Paris.
35 years after the last Direct Action trial, and five years after the fiasco of the Tarnac affair, the ultra-left returns to the forefront of the legal scene: seven people appear from Tuesday October 3 in Paris, suspected of having planned violent actions against police officers and soldiers.
>> The head of the DGSI warns of the “resurgence” of violent actions by the ultra-right
Until October 27, six men and a woman, aged 33 to 39, will be tried for terrorist conspiracy before the criminal court. Three of them will also be for “refusal to submit a secret agreement for deciphering a means of cryptology“. Everyone disputes the facts.
“Nothing terrorist”
At the origin of the file, a report from the DGSI on a violent action plan fomented by ultra-left activists. It was a man who first attracted suspicion: Florian D., 39 years old. This anarchist activist spent 10 months in 2017 alongside Kurdish fighters in Syria. He intended to fight against the Islamic State group, he said, when the prosecution suspected him of having trained in the use of weapons. Upon his return in 2018, he was immediately monitored by the DGSI; microphones were, for example, placed in his van.
Investigators are convinced that he is trying to recruit acquaintances and is planning violent action in France against police officers or soldiers. They also hear of attempts to make explosive devices, such as TATP.
“Nothing terrorist“, replies Florian D’s lawyer, Raphaël Kempf: “THE manufacturing of firecrackers, there were two of them and this took place in a context which had absolutely nothing to do with terrorismhe tells franceinfo. It was more of a form of playful experimentation. This is only a romanticized reading on the part of the prosecution and the DGSI, which says that my client and the other defendants would have had the desire to attack the symbols of the State.”
“Political” trial
The seven defendants named the case “The affair of December 8”, this day in 2020, when the police arrested them. After several months of surveillance and listening, the suspects were arrested on December 8, 2020, in various places in France (Toulouse, Rennes or even Vitry-sur-Seine), then indicted: Camille B., with whom he was talking a romantic relationship, but also Simon G., a pyrotechnician at Disneyland met at punk parties when they were 18, and Manuel H., with whom he had attended the same agricultural high school. The three other defendants, Loïc M., William D. and Bastien A., met Florian D. on the ZAD of the Sivens dam (Tarn) in 2014.
The suspects are suspected of having participated in “tactical progression and shooting training” in an abandoned house in Haute-Garonne and manufacturing and testing explosives, with a view to “tearing down republican institutions” by taking from police and soldiers, according to justice which is based on conversations listened to by investigators. However, no imminent action was envisaged. During the searches, the police found products used to manufacture explosives and weapons. A real “political” trial according to their lawyers, who, conversely, intend to put anti-terrorism and its methods on trial today.
Before this affair, the last known referral to the anti-terrorist justice system for facts linked to the ultra-left dates back to the Tarnac affair in 2008, for suspicion of sabotage of TGV lines. But the terrorist qualifications, the subject of a bitter debate, were abandoned by the courts before the trial, which ended in 2018 with an almost general acquittal. The last trial for terrorism of ultra-left activists dates back to 1995, when seven members of the Lyon branch of Direct Action, an armed far-left group behind several attacks in the 1980s, were sentenced to 30 years of criminal imprisonment.