Police custody of Jean-Christophe Lagarde was lifted last night without prosecution at this stage, the Paris prosecutor’s office told franceinfo on Thursday September 8. The president of the Union of Democrats and Independents (UDI) Jean-Christophe Lagarde, former deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis, was placed in police custody on Wednesday September 7 as part of the investigation into the false accusations against Raquel Garrido and Alexis Corbiere.
In addition, the police custody of ex-policeman Anouar B. was also lifted on Wednesday at the end of the day, without prosecution at this stage as well, adds the Paris prosecutor’s office. A third suspect with unknown identity has been indicted in the investigation, franceinfo learned on Thursday from a police source. This person was presented a little earlier to an investigating judge.
>> False accusations against the Garrido-Corbière couple: “This case is not over”, reacts Alexis Corbière
Judicial information has been opened on the counts of “organized fraud, forgery and use of forgery, theft of identity or personal data and concealment of theft”.
This third person will be presented to an examining magistrate for a possible indictment, franceinfo learned from the Paris prosecutor’s office, without specifying the identity of the suspect.
The investigations into the false accusations were entrusted to an examining magistrate, specifies the parquet floor.
At the heart of this case, a pseudo-investigation published by the journalist Aziz Zemouri on June 22 in the weekly Pointin which he accused the couple of deputies La France insoumise of employing “for a year a cleaning lady without a residence permit and subjected to infernal cadences“, relying on so-called screenshots of heated text conversations between Raquel Garrido and her cleaning lady. Except that these images were montages. Point removed the article the day after it was published.
Raquel Garrido and Alexis Corbière filed a complaint against X, against the journalist and against the weekly, and the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an investigation on June 29. Under fire from critics and laid off, Aziz Zemouri then turned against his sources, Jean-Christophe Lagarde and ex-policeman Noam Anouar, announcing to file a complaint for “breach of trust”.
This false information was released on June 22, three days after the defeat of Jean-Christophe Lagarde in the legislative elections. He was beaten by Raquel Garrido in the 5th district of Seine-Saint-Denis. According to Aziz Zemouri, his sources wanted the accusations to come out in the press before this election.