Isn’t it ironic, and odd, that a high-ranking French policeman, just newly placed in charge of the biggest investigation of his life, should suddenly kill himself the very night after the crime? I’m speaking here of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, and the police officer in question, Helric Fredou. According to Contrainjerencia, there are ample reasons to doubt official versions of the story, not only of the massacre itself, but also of the alleged suicide of the police chief leading up the investigation. And some of them come straight from the mouth of the late chief’s own sister:
French police commissioner Helric Fredou, who was placed in charge of the investigations over the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and found dead in the Commissariat of Limoges the night of that same day, was trying to make a “very urgent” phone call moments before his death, reveals local independent journalist Hicham Hamza.
“They took away his computers and personal mobile phone from us,” said Fredou’s sister to Hamza, in an interview on the day after the commissioner’s funeral. The interview was published on Friday. “They took everything. It shocked us, but they told us it was standard procedure.”
Fredou, whose name had not even been mentioned in several French dailies of record (but in the foreign press), was to have investigated somebody known to one of the victims, not named officially, but whom Hamza easily identified as Jeanette Bougrab, a high-level state functionary, and member of the right-wing “Union for a Popular Movement” (UMP).
Bougrab appeared in the days after the crime on various news reports as the companion of murdered cartoonist Stéphane Charbonnier, alias “Charb”, and made a series of emotional declarations of an islamophobic nature.
The relationship has however been denied by Laurent, the brother of the cartoonist, in a categorical manner, and by Parisian municipal council member Clémentine Autain, who had ties to “Charb”, and called Bougrab a “usurper”.
In his investigation, Hamza pointed out distinct elements who support doubts as to the existence of the relationship, such as discrepancies in the number of years that they had supposedly been together; previous declarations by Bougrab, a single woman, in which she said that her adopted daughter lamented “not having a father”; Charbonnier being solo at his last birthday party, and a long etcetera.
The supposed companion, whose family took up arms against the National Liberation Front of Algeria in defence of French colonialism in that North African land, is well known for her anti-Islamic diatribes and her membership in Zionist networks of great influence in French circles of power.
As well, the first French public figure who asserted a relationship between Charbonnier and Bougrab was journalist Caroline Fourest, known for spreading falsehoods of a defamatory nature about Islam, with her assertion that the assassins of Charlie Hebdo had forced a surviving employee to recite verses from the Koran — a lie refuted by the employee herself.
All these contradictions and political implications of the murder of Charbonnier were why Commissioner Fredou was investigating, according to Hamza. His death has barely been mentioned by the French press, strangely given the importance of the recent murders for French national security, and perhaps international security as well.
In the few hours of the investigation, said Fredou’s sister, “the day was very tense”, and police from the capital had been sent to Limoges, arriving at the Commissariat around 11:30 in the evening. Fredou “was supposed to redact a report, but there were frictions, I don’t know about what…” the sister explained.
After those frictions, the interviewee continued, “he told them he had to make a very urgent phone call, and when they saw that he hadn’t come back, a colleague went looking for him in his office, and found him dead.” The next day, “people came from Paris to tell us that he had committed suicide,” she said.
Informed of the death at 5:00 a.m., the family had to insist repeatedly before finally being allowed to see the body “at the end of the day”. Even though Fredou had shot himself in the head, according to the official report, “he had a bandage on his forehead. They had opened the side for the autopsy. The back of the head had nothing on it,” said Fredou’s sister.
Helric Fredou had found the bodies of suicides before. After one of them, his sister said, “he said to Mother: ‘I will never do anything like that to you’, that is, kill himself and leave her all alone.”
Translation mine.
So you can see that this is a highly improbable “suicide”. If Helric Fredou, who had attended the scene of several suicides, had promised his own mother that he would never inflict such a horror upon her, it is more than a little suspicious that he would be found dead in precisely such circumstances himself.
There is no reason to assume that the chief was so mentally unstable as to do it, either, according to Hicham Hamza’s own report. It’s a bit messy, being a rather rambling blog entry, but here are the key bits:
Wednesday, January 14, the day after the funeral for Helric Fredou, Panamza [Hamza, the blogger] contacted his sister, who prefers to remain unidentified, to clarify the implication of the police officer, vaguely evoked by the regional press, in the inquest relating to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Principal extracts from the telephone call:
“Right away, I told myself it’s not possible, that someone blew him away, but we’re not in a movie”: the sister refuses to believe in the terrible possibility of a murder but continues to ask questions about the exact circumstances of the policeman’s death.
“No letter left behind, not even the badge on his desk”: Helric Fredou didn’t leave behind any letter explaining his act. At the same time, he didn’t put his police badge in evidence as he sometimes did with certain of his colleagues who were found dead of suicide.
“He was a calm person, with a great spirit of discernment, according to his trainer”: the sister underlined many times the cool-headedness of the policeman — held in high regard by his trainer because of his perspicacity — and the fact that he was neither violent nor impulsive.
“They took away his computers and his mobile phone, they took it all away from us, that shocked us but that’s the procedure, they told us”: on the afternoon of January 8, the police searched the home of the deceased, in the presence of his mother and sister, before taking away his informatic materials and personal smartphone.
“My mom, who was very attached to him, is devastated. She wants to know how he could have killed himself. He had a bandage on his forehead. On the side, he was trepanned because of the autopsy. On the back of the skull, there’s nothing”: Informed at 5 a.m. of the death, the sister reports having had to insist in order to see the corpse of the deceased. It’s only at the end of the day that she and her mother were authorized to see the body of Helric Fredou.
“My brother himself found two suicides, and he told Mom, ‘I’ll never play a trick like that on you,’ meaning to kill himself and leave her alone. He was not depressive”: In November 2013, Helric Fredou was in fact the police officer who discovered the body of his colleague, Christophe Rivieccio, dead in the same commissariat of Limoges.
“My brother was at home that night, and since he was on call, they called and he went to the commissariat around 11:30…the day was very tense, according to his colleagues…the Paris police were present that night…He had to redact a report, but there were some frictions, I don’t know why…He told them that he had to make a very urgent phone call and when they saw that he hadn’t come back, a colleague went to look for him in his office and found him dead”: This Wednesday night, some police officers went to perform security verifications around a family of the victim of the crime and were debriefed by Helric Fredou. The sister’s witness account brings in two troubling elements: “frictions” arose between the police officers concerning the report (which was never touched), which Fredou was to redact; in this tense context, the man was found dead some minutes after having told his colleagues that he had to immediately telephone someone unidentified.
“Some people from Paris came to tell us how that happened”: the sister underscores that the cadres of the national police were sent the next day to Limoges, expressly, and had to certify that it was a suicide.
Translation, again, mine.
Hamza goes on to say that he attempted to contact the Bougrab family, whom Fredou was investigating at the time of his death, but that the effort was wasted; the mother of Jeannette Bougrab answered the phone, but said only, “It’s none of my business, all that, go away, goodbye.”
He then recounts how Stéphane Charbonnier’s family denied all “relational engagement” between “Charb” and Jeannette Bougrab. Clémentine Autain, close to the clan, calls the former Fillon government secretary a “usurper”. Meanwhile, Bougrab has been all over the media, telling Paris-Match that she had been with “Charb” for three years, before correcting herself and then saying they had been together for “one year”. And on December 15 of last year, she had told Gala magazine that her daughter called Charb “Papa”, and that she dreamed of being married one day, so that her daughter would not have to suffer the ignominy of having a single mother anymore. She has been posing as a widow in all but name since Charb was shot.
And even before then, she seemed strangely prescient about how Charb would die. In her autobiography, published in January of 2013, she wrote:
“In view of the assaults of those who would like to bring back the penalization of blasphemy, I assert the right to make fun of the gods. Long live blasphemy! Long live the secular Republic!
“The latest guardians of secularism are named Caroline Fourest, Élisabeth Badinter, Charlie, that is Charlie Hebdo…Denouncing the heap of religious fundamentalisms, including the Catholic, they take risks for their own security. The life of Charb is in danger from now on. Many security agents assure his protection, since this geek in glasses has become a target of Islamists. An exit identical to that of Theo Van Gogh could be reserved for him: to be assassinated by a God-crazed man in the street.”
Here’s the book page in question:
And if there is any doubt about Bougrab’s right-wing sympathies, here she is in a video published on October 29 of last year, expressing support for Nicolas Sarkozy on the latter’s own YouTube channel:
Oh yeah, and Caroline Fourest, the name that popped up alongside Charb in Bougrab’s oddly prescient book, as well as claiming that Charb and Bougrab were a couple when they were not? Here she is, making some ugly islamophobic remarks of her own about the Charlie massacre:
“They killed children, they killed teddybears”? “It’s the September 11 of free thought”? Sounds like the kind of shit you’d hear on FUX Snooze. Little wonder she’s not a credible witness to the alleged relationship between Charb and Bougrab, but a very avid propagandist thereof.
Hamza wraps it up with a curious remark:
“It’s up to you, reader-citizen, to break the strange French omertà around the Fredou/Bougrab affair. Right now, nothing allows us to assert that the policeman was killed to shut him up about what he had unexpectedly discovered. Nevertheless, looking at the shadowy circumstances around his death, in a context of political hyper-exploitation of the crime, nothing at the same time authorizes us to draw the hypothesis of an expeditious murder disguised as a suicide for reasons of ‘depression’. A final troubling detail: A man today at the summit of the State has never publicly said a word of compassion about the subject of Helric Fredou, event though he was in regular contact with him in the recent past. From 2010 to 2012, the policeman was central commissioner of Cherbourg. At the same time, the the deputy mayor of the coastal town was none other than Bernard Cazeneuve, the current minister of the Interior, in charge of the inquest into the crime, and a discreet member of the pro-Israel movement.”
A discreet member…as opposed to Jeannette Bougrab, who has been anything BUT discreet about her right-wing, anti-Islam, and pro-Israeli sympathies. Curiouser and curiouser, especially in light of this McClatchy article, which affirms that the gunmen in the Charlie massacre had ties to a “former” officer of French intelligence, who allegedly defected to al-Qaida in Iraq, and that they appeared to have extensive and systematic military or paramilitary training. And France is currently at war with “Islamists” in Iraq and Syria, no doubt much to the pleasure of the right-wing Zionists of Israel…a war whose cause is very conveniently bolstered by the whole freedom-of-speech hullabaloo around Charlie.
No, you can’t draw any solid conclusions about the whole sordid affair just yet. Other than, of course, the blinding obvious: That this story bears watching a lot more closely, and with a very critical eye. But even just this very rudimentary, early bit of connecting the dots reveals a lot of extremely hinky things going on behind the scenes, n’est-ce pas?
