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When the severed heads of seven French Trappist monks were found in a remote mountainous region of Algeria in May 1996, it was natural to assume the murders were the latest gruesome act by jihadists in their long-running and bloody campaign against the Algerian government. Thirteen years on, however, the victims' families, church officials and the French and Algerian publics have been shocked by the revelation that the monks may have been killed as the result of a bungled Algerian military operation. According to testimony given by retired French general François Buchwalter as part of an official investigation in France, French and Algerian authorities covered up the mistake by pinning the massacre on the jihadists.
The disclosure comes weeks after a leak in a separate investigation into the deaths of 11 French naval engineers in a 2002 bomb blast in Pakistan. Initially blamed on Islamist extremists, the bombing, French investigators now believe, was likely the work of Pakistani military intelligence officials angry that France had stopped the payment of a kickback connected to a $1 billion submarine contract between Paris and Islamabad.
That such dramatic developments in two such sensitive cases should come now is probably no coincidence. Call them Exhibits A and B in the case to protect France's legal system from President Nicolas Sarkozy's reformist zeal. Sarkozy wants to do away with the post of independent investigating judge — a key feature of France's legal system — and place control of criminal inquiries in the hands of politically appointed state prosecutors. Citing a small number of high-profile instances in which judges have overstepped their investigative and detention powers, Sarkozy says he wants to reform France's inquisitorial justice system by moving it towards the more adversarial American and British model. French lawyers and judges are furious with the proposals, which they say will politicize the French system. "The intent of Sarkozy's plan is clear: to put investigations back under political control by eliminating the magistrate and putting prosecutors in charge," says Patrick Baudouin, who represents victims' families in the monk case. "This case of the monks is the best example yet that once an independent judge is allowed to investigate, the ability of the rich, the powerful and the state to keep the truth covered up is reduced to almost nothing."
Skeptics have long sniffed at the official Franco-Algerian version of how the monks were abducted and murdered. But Buchwalter's statement — given to investigating magistrate Marc Trévidic, who also happens to be overseeing the Pakistan case — blows the biggest hole yet in the idea that the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) killed the seven men. According to Buchwalter, an army intelligence official serving as military attaché to France's embassy in Algiers at the time of the killings, he was told by Algerian colleagues that the monks had died when an Algerian army helicopter patrolling an area south of the capital, Algiers, opened fire on what soldiers thought was a terrorist encampment. The monks were among the corpses discovered there. When Buchwalter reported that news to his superiors, he said, he was ordered to remain silent to protect French-Algerian relations. "There are a lot of aspects of the official story that just don't stand up, including the fact that several alerts on the Algerian army's responsibility were never followed up," says a French counterterrorism official who confirmed to Time the existence of Buchwalter's testimony after it was first reported by French daily Le Figaro. "Why were only the severed heads of the monks found and returned to France? If you can find the heads, you can find the bodies — unless there's a reason someone doesn't want the bodies to be found."
An Incredible Tale
The story of the monks from the Tibhirine monastery — some 55 miles (90 km) south of Algiers — has always been full of inconsistencies. A few weeks after the monks disappeared in late March 1996, a GIA statement claimed that the men had been grabbed so they could be exchanged for captured militants, a notion that perplexed terrorist experts more used to the GIA killing its enemies in well-planned strikes. Puzzlement grew when the GIA issued a second communiqué in May, saying that it had "slit the throats of the seven monks." Some French officials suspect Algerian secret-service officials had actually staged the abduction to further demonize the GIA in European eyes. The follow-up plan to free the monks in a "rescue operation," sources speculate, was ruined when unsuspecting regular-army forces attacked the suspected militants. Algerian leaders have emphatically denied all allegations.
News of Buchwalter's testimony has prompted others with knowledge of the case to go public. Former French anti-terrorism magistrate Alain Marsaud noted on July 7 that he, too, had alerted his superiors that an Algerian intelligence official had told him that the army had been responsible for the killings. That warning, Marsaud says, was "intentionally buried." Father Armand Veilleux, who in 1996 was procurator general of the Cistercian order in Rome, says he met stiff resistance from French officials in Algiers when he insisted on seeing the corpses — and was ultimately told only the heads had been recovered. Veilleux says the officials then ordered him to keep what he had been told secret. "We're convinced the bodies were never recovered because they were riddled with bullets — something that would have discredited Algeria's official version and revealed the active complicity by French officials in covering the truth up," says lawyer Baudouin.
Similar doubts exist about the official story in the Pakistan bombing case. French counterterrorism officials have been privately airing their skepticism about jihadist responsibility for the 2002 attack for months. In June, word leaked to the press that the investigating magistrates handling the case had all but abandoned the idea that al-Qaeda was behind the bombing. Lawyers representing families of the attack's French victims told reporters they'd received a briefing by Trévidic and fellow judge Yves Jannier in which they were told that Pakistani officials may have organized the strike. This new theory hinges on the change in France's government in 1995, a year after Paris signed a $1 billion deal to sell Agosta submarines to Pakistan. The cabinet of newly elected President Jacques Chirac decided to hold back payment of some $33 million in kickbacks that had been promised to Pakistani officials. French security officials tell Time that investigators have obtained documents and testimonies from people involved with the deal naming Pakistani officials who were designated to receive "commissions" for their help.
Investigators speculate that in 2000, when France applied an international anticorruption convention banning all kickbacks, those Pakistani officials grew angry. French authorities suspect that members of Pakistan's overlapping military, intelligence and political circles then decided to settle their score by symbolically targeting the French submarine engineers tied to the contract, manipulating extremists whom Pakistan has long been accused of supporting to carry out the suicide bombing. Pakistan has denied all the accusations; a spokeswoman for President Ali Zardari calls them "farcical at best."
On July 7, in response to the furor the monk-case allegations had provoked, Sarkozy agreed to "declassify all documents justice officials request" to enable investigating judges to "continue getting all means to conduct their inquiry." Two days later, he extended that offer to the Karachi bombing investigation. The President had initially derided the idea that the bombing might have been a Pakistani revenge attack as "grotesque." "Who would ever believe such a fable?" he asked.
That question and its answer are exactly why France needs independent investigating magistrates, some French legal practitioners say. They point to the two terrorism cases as proof of the vital role of magistrates, who perform an evidence-collecting function that has been central to France's justice system for over 200 years. Sarkozy's proposed reforms will shift investigative power from independent magistrates to state prosecutors, who, critics of the reforms fear, might end up paying more attention to the political interests of leaders than to justice. That could result in French justice bending to the whims of politicians as it did in the 1970s and '80s when magistrates found themselves unable to resist political meddling. Judges eventually found a way of seizing their power back by conniving to get details of investigations into the press before they could be stopped. Some believe that the French system's tradition of independence itself is now under threat.
France's Napoleonic justice system may indeed need modernizing. The question is whether reforms will undermine some of its most cherished values.
- Bruce Crumley / Paris
- The mystery deepens in two terrorism cases