FRANCE: French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday expressed doubts about allegations that French police tortured suspects during a bombing campaign by Islamists in 1995.
"I am stunned. I am astonished that incidents this serious were never denounced, considering the number of people who were present at the interrogations."
For their book Place Beauvau; the Hidden Face of the Police, three investigative journalists from Le Point magazine interviewed five officers who served with the division of the judiciary police assigned to fighting terrorism. (Place Beauvau is the address of the interior ministry and national police headquarters.) Between July and October 1995, eight people were killed and 150 wounded in a series of bombings by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group in Paris and Lyon.
In a scene which the book's authors compare to the photos that later came out of Abu Ghraib prison in US-occupied Iraq, a suspect named Slimane Rahmouni was paraded on a leash, with a plastic bag over his head, during a party for 15 officers at the headquarters of the judiciary police in Lyon. Police allegedly used a device the size of a mobile telephone, which gives 180,000 volt shocks, to torture Mr Rahmouni.
Jacques Debray, a lawyer in Lyon, told Le Parisien newspaper that two of his clients, Abdelkader Maameri and Abdelkader Bouhadjar, arrested on September 27th, 1995, were tortured. "Lying in his own vomit, deprived of everything, especially sleep, he was hit on the head and his ear-drums burst," Mr Debray said of Mr Maameri.
Mr Boudhadjar told the investigating magistrate that he was forced to stand on a Koran and given electric shocks. The book also says that an imam from northern France was dangled by his feet from a fifth floor window.
"Every three days a bomb was exploding or was discovered," one of the cops recounts in Place Beauvau. "We had to find the bombers, no matter what."
Mr Sarkozy has launched an investigation into the allegations.
In another development that harms France's image as "the country of human rights", Alvaro Gil-Robles, the EU commissioner for human rights, is to publish a 108-page report on Respect for Human Rights in France tomorrow, detailing deplorable conditions in French prisons and police commissariats.
Mr Gil-Robles spent 16 days visiting seven French prisons and five police stations last September. Referring to the jail for foreigners beneath the Palais de Justice in Paris, he said: "In my life, except perhaps in Moldavia, I have never seen a worse centre."
His report recommends the "immediate closure" of the basement prison, and notes that the antiquated facilities of La Santé in Paris and Les Baumettes in Marseilles are "at the limit of human dignity".
Mr Gil-Robles said he was "shocked" by "the pitiful state" of detention cells in police stations. "I was very surprised that in a very large number of commissariats visited, the detainees slept on the floor; no mattresses or sheets were provided."
The worst problem is overcrowding. France had 58,082 prisoners in November 2005, compared to 49,700 in 2001; 700 minors are imprisoned with adults.