Informant Claude Hermant implicates French state in Charlie Hebdo attacks
By
Anthony Torres
22 May 2017
Claude Hermant, a police informant arrested in the case of the January 7, 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, has implicated the French state in the preparation of the attack. Hermant, who allegedly sold weapons used by Amédy Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers to commit the attacks, is reportedly charging that three gendarme military policemen and two customs officials, as well as organized crime circles, were involved.
The case shatters the official narrative, according to which terror attacks in France, Belgium, and Germany since 2015 have been the work of isolated Islamists.
Hermant’s lawyer, Maxime Moulin, does not dispute the fact that weapons that passed through the hands of his client, who was acting for the customs’ intelligence agency until 2013 and then worked for the gendarmerie, reached Coulibaly. The media and established political parties covered up this fact, together with Hermant’s arrest after the attacks due to his relations with Coulibaly. The interior minister in 2015, Bernard Cazeneuve, even invoked the states secrets privilege in regard to investigations of the relations between Hermant and the Islamists.
Moulin filed a suit with the state prosecutor’s office in Lille on May 2, accusing the interior minister of endangering his client’s life. He stated, “We are demanding the lifting of the states secrets privilege. Things are being hidden, this was the solution that we found to obtain the truth. … We want to have access to this information. We are officially asking that the Interior Ministry lift the states secrets privilege on all contact reports [between the gendarmerie and Claude Hermant]. We want to know what reports were…