“It’s the only time in my career where I think I broke down when I got home.” The confession of Pierre Penalba, his eyes moist and his voice broken by memories, speaks volumes about the trauma that remains to him, more than six years after the events. Sitting in his living room, the young retiree of the Nice judicial police recounts at length this evening of July 14, 2016, during which Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel launched the 19-tonne truck he had rented on the Promenade des Anglais, killing 86 and injuring hundreds.
>> “I’m no longer afraid of trucks, I’m no longer afraid of the dark”: six years after the Nice attack, the children of July 14 bruised but alive
That day, Commander Penalba, head of the cybercrime unit at the Nice judicial police, was on vacation 250 km from the Promenade des Anglais. At 10:33 p.m., a first call arrived at the Nice Samu. Fifteen minutes later, Pierre Penalba receives a first alert. Thirty minutes later, he was officially recalled and took his car towards Nice. The rest of his night, he devotes it to what he has been doing for years: collecting the images, recovering their electronic devices from the victims, and finally, in the early morning, throwing himself body and soul into analyzing the videos. He is remained on deck for 72 hours non-stop.
The advisability of broadcasting all of these images was raised on the second day of the trial of the attack before the special assize court in Paris and which is broadcast in Nice. President Laurent Raviot has watched the videos himself, under seal, before taking the decision to broadcast them during the trial.
Pierre Penalba is an expert in his field. In 2007, in Nice, he set up the first cybercrime unit outside Paris, and wrote a book entirely devoted to the subject (Cyber crimespublished by Albin Michel). “I relived this attack for months, I was going to say hundreds of times. I relived it from all angles since we had to use these videos, we had to see them, watch them and each time, it plunges you back into this drama”remembers the cyberinvestigator.
“You have to get involved as much as possible. It was our city, it was the people we were protecting who had been injured or killed. We weren’t motivated, but we were concerned, it was us.”
Peter Penalbaat franceinfo
The advisability of broadcasting all of these images was raised on the second day of the trial of this attack which opened on September 5 before the special assize court in Paris and which is broadcast in Nice. President Laurent Raviot watched the videos himself, under seal, before making his decision.
“There were lots of people filming at the time of the attack, remembers the cyberinvestigator. For example, you have people filming themselves during the party, like you do with your children, with your family. You film yourself and you hear a noise. You turn around and you have a truck come over you, crush you. What you see is death live.” And what is “terrible”in the words of the investigator, it is having to replay the same videos dozens of times to “try to determine if there could be accomplices who could have, for example, jumped from the truck or accompanied him, or even people, suspects who would have filmed the scene to make a claim”.
It was this investigation that made it possible to quickly determine that Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel acted alone. “It was essential”, insists the commander of the judicial police. He also participated in the searches at the home of the terrorist, whom the investigation had made it possible to identify.
There was the terrible, and “the unbearable” for this grandfather of three children: the videos where he saw children being run over by the truck, “sprayed” he said several times. Pierre Penalba is however not a man who is easily shocked. With 34 years of service on the clock, almost half of which on cybercrime, he has worked on terrorism, child pornography and murder cases. But the death of these children will have marked him for life.
“You can watch any movie, even horror. You know it’s tricks. This isn’t cinema. You know that the people you’re seeing are on a table. autopsy.”
Peter Penalbaat franceinfo
The assured voice of Pierre Penalba trembles a little when asked about the aftermath, about the moment when he returned home, after intense hours of work. “I find it hard to talk about ithe confides after long silences. When you see that, you can’t say: me, it didn’t matter to me. It is not possible. I cracked up when I got home.” Especially since the police officer also went to the Promenade this evening of July 14, 2016, to assist his colleagues who were recovering the victims’ telephones. “We saw the people who had survived, who were there, who were injured, the families who had been decimated. You see them screaming, they are in extreme pain and you are absorbing it. You may be professional, in conditions like that, you absorb some of it.”
It is perhaps this deep trauma that explains his anger when he evokes another event, the day after the attack. An advertisement had been posted on Le Bon Coin to resell objects recovered on the Promenade: wallets, jewels, objects stained with blood. “It was perhaps that day that I had the quickest response from the prosecution to go and search using force, because it must have been within two minutes.welcomes Pierre Penalba. He said to me, ‘Go ahead and don’t take gloves. You force the door open, bring him back and take all his gear’.” The commander of the judicial police of Nice gave a nickname to this man: “the scavenger”. “I kept the photos of what he had stolen to remind me that the human soul can be very dark”he adds.
For a long time, Pierre Penalba could not return to the Promenade des Anglais. The videos haunted him for many months. “You have overlapping images”, he says. It’s better today. He may return to the “Prom”, but certainly has not forgotten. Of these 34 years of career, the attack of Nice will remain the business which will accompany it in its retirement.