PARIS LETTER: Nearly 20 years after he and two Irish friends were framed by a French supergendarme, Stephen King remembers the events of August 28th, 1982, with total clarity.
King was lying face down on the floor in an apartment rented under an assumed name by another Irish Republican Socialist Party militant, Michael Plunkett. His T-shirt was pulled over his head and his hands tied behind his back.
"They put a cold metallic object in my hand," he recalled. "I heard the magazine click, and I thought, 'they're putting my fingerprints on the gun and they'll make it look like a suicide.' Half an hour later, Mick came home and was arrested. He saw my red T-shirt and he thought it was blood and he shouted, 'Are you okay?' and I said, 'Yeah, it's a frame-up'."
That night, Francois Mitterrand's Élysée Palace issued a triumphant statement. The arrests were reported around the world as a brilliant feat by the newly formed Groupe d'intervention de la gendarmerie nationale (GIGN) - described as "an elite anti-terrorist unit" - against Irish superterroristes. King was taken to Fresnes prison, Plunkett to La Santé and his companion, Mary Reid, to Fléury-Merogis.
The three IRSP members spent the first two of nine months in prison in solitary confinement. "The warders treated us very badly in the beginning," King continued. "I had lots of comrades locked up. It was always a possibility." But the Élysée's case quickly unravelled. In February 1983, Le Monde accused the GIGN of fabricating evidence. No fingerprints were submitted from the three Czech handguns seized in the apartment, and photos taken at the time of the arrests disappeared. Pierre Caudan, a local gendarme, told a magistrate that "objects may have been brought to the apartment before the arrests" and that he "received orders to dissimulate a certain number of points." The three Irish citizens were cleared on October 5th, 1983.
Two years later, a Frenchman named Bernard Jégat confirmed that he had personally handed over the weapons and explosives used to frame the Irish to Capt Paul Barril, the GIGN officer who staged the raid on the Vincennes apartment. In 1992, Plunkett and Reid filed a suit against Barril for "violation of personal freedom", which King later joined as a civil plaintiff. The investigating magistrate did nothing for more than eight years, during which Caudan and Jégat, both key witnesses, died.Under pressure from the media and his superiors, Judge Yves Madre finally began working on the case towards the end of 2000. Two weeks ago, the Versailles appeals court annulled 20 years of proceedings on minor technicalities, and Capt Barril was let off.
Plunkett and Reid, who now live in Dublin and Derry, have appealed to France's Supreme Court, and King may join the appeal from his home in Brittany.
The Versailles annulment is all the more absurd because the Supreme Court recognised Capt Barril's guilt in a November 28th, 1995, ruling in favour of Le Monde, whom Barril tried to sue three times for libel.
Le Monde was correct in reporting that "the operation was from beginning to end a frame-up carried out by Capt Barril, who tricked the political and judiciary authorities and public opinion, and who provoked . . . the imprisonment of three innocent people," the Supreme Court concluded.
Jean Pineau, a gendarme in Versailles when the Irish were arrested, told Judge Madre that he saw Barril take out a chunk of plastic explosives wrapped in aluminium foil, stick fuses into it and hide it in the toilet of the Vincennes apartment.
Another gendarme, Michel Lemonnier, saw serial numbers on the weapons placed by Barril in the apartment, but these were filed off by the time Barril delivered them to the gendarmerie station in plastic bags .
Barril's supervisor, Christian Prouteau, was awarded the Legion of Honour and made a government prefect by the late President Mitterrand. Barril left the French army, wrote a best-seller and started a private security firm called "Secrets". Both men are officially under investigation in another Mitterrand era scandal, the wire-tapping of hundreds of telephones in connection with the Irish arrests and the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. But that case has not gone forward either.
Le Monde said the Versailles court's cancellation of the case against Barril demonstrated "the inability of French justice to deal with crimes committed in the name of the State and implicating the institution of the presidency."
Antoine Comte, the lawyer for Plunkett and Reid, says the Irish episode is "a textbook case of impunity for state crimes".
Yet Comte puts faith in the final appeal, which could be heard this year.
"If the Supreme Court turns the case around," he says, "then Barril is going to be sitting in front of his judges."
