“Le Monde” reveals recordings of telephone calls which show that the police forbade the Samu to intervene. The League for Human Rights confirms that these exchanges are accurate
The prefect of Deux-Sèvres, Emmanuelle Dubée, returns on Tuesday March 28 in a right of reply to the information disseminated in an article in the newspaper THE World title Sainte-Soline: the recording which proves that the Samu did not have the right to intervene. The article reports a telephone exchange recorded by the League for Human Rights (LDH) between a doctor, a lawyer from the LDH and the Samu. Words reported “perfectly compliant”the LDH confirmed to franceinfo on Wednesday March 29, while the conditions for the intervention of the Samu and the doctors to help the injured during the demonstration against the “mega basins” of Sainte-Soline, Saturday March 25, are at the heart of ‘controversy.
>> Demonstration against the “mega-basins” in Sainte-Soline: the LDH accuses the police of having hindered the intervention of the relief workers
“If the transcript of the article suggests that the military doctors did not intervene for the benefit of the participants in the rally, it is clear that this assertion is false”writes the prefect in her press release. The prefect highlights the intervention of a doctor from the gendarmerie “who notably rescued an injured participant in absolute emergency”. “He was the target of projectiles when he left while he provided first aid and waited for the arrival of the Samu at his side”, she adds.
A question of the safety of emergency personnel
To guarantee the safety of firefighters or Samu personnel in a “hostile context, it is up to the law enforcement authorities to define whether the arrival of an emergency vehicle at a certain point is possible or not”, says Emmanuelle Dubée. “It is therefore not surprisingshe continues, that, if these security conditions were not met, the police could, for certain geolocations and in certain periods of time, indicate that an ambulance dispatch was not possible immediately. It is therefore only to prevent the Samu or the firefighters from being taken to task or collateral victims of the violent clashes that this instruction could be passed”adds the prefect.
#SainteSoline | Right of reply from the prefect of Deux-Sèvres following the article in the newspaper Le Monde, claiming to prove that the “SAMU did not have the right to intervene”.
Find the press release below ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/xpAmaY2WGv
– Prefect of Deux-Sèvres (@Prefet79) March 28, 2023
One of the lawyers of the League of Human Rights (LDH), Pierre-Antoine Cazaux, denounced on Sunday on franceinfo the delay in the intervention of relief to come to the aid of the injured, Saturday in Sainte-Soline. “We explicitly heard the emergency doctor from the Samu say clearly that they had the order not to intervene from the command on site”, he asserted. Pierre-Antoine Cazaux added that he attended, as an observer, “several calls with the Samu from a doctor who explained that there was a life-threatening emergency. The answer we gave him was that he could not intervene.”