the investigation returns to the trail of a “high-ranking gangster”, who died in 1986

According to Mediapart, a certain Henri Geliot was identified in this case, after the testimony of a man heard by the investigating judge in 2023. The prosecution confirmed this information on Friday.

A new key testimony has relaunched the investigation into the death of Robert Boulin, 45 years after the death of the politician, then minister of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The Versailles public prosecutor’s office confirmed, Friday October 4, information from Mediapart revealing that a witness heard in 2023 had made it possible to identify a “ugly” named Henri Geliot, died in 1986. These “factual information” are indeed in the file, according to the prosecution, but, at this stage, “no conclusion in one direction or another has been drawn from this, judicially speaking”.

In September, France Inter revealed that this recent testimony was that of a person ensuring having attended, in 1979, a conversation supporting the thesis according to which the Minister of Labor had been assassinated. LThe witness then took care to note the registration of the vehicle of one of the men he had heard. According to Mediapart and a source close to the case cited by AFP, this information made it possible to go back to this “high-ranking crook”who presented himself in this exchange as one of the men involved in the crime.

According to Mediapart, Henri Geliot, born in 1919 and a cafe owner by profession, had been accused mainly between 1939 and 1958 for various crimes, including violence with a firearm. His name, however, had never been mentioned in the case concerning the death of the former minister, found dead in 1979 in a pond in the Rambouillet forest (Yvelines).

“We are beginning to feel the beginnings of relief in seeing that despite the reluctance of the judicial institution to do its job, things are moving forward”reacted to AFP Marie Dosé, lawyer for the politician’s daughter, Fabienne Boulin-Burgeat. “However, there remains a lot of work to be done” in this case, estimated the lawyer, hoping that “justice finally shows itself worthy of its mission.”

The official thesis is that of suicide, which Robert Boulin’s family has continued to contest. The investigation was reopened in 2015, after a new complaint from the politician’s daughter.