A year and a half after the disappearance of a gun safe belonging to former presidential security aide Alexandre Benalla, prosecutors in Paris have announced a judge-led investigation into the issue.
The probe, officially launched on November 5th 2019, targets persons unknown for the “removal of documents or objects relating to a crime or offence with the aim of hindering the truth from coming out”. Under France's criminal code, this offence is punishable by up to three years imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros.
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The move follows several months of investigation led by the chief Paris prosecutor Rémy Heitz, who was appointed by President Emmanuel Macron and who under French law is linked to the executive and not independent. It means that an independent investigating judge will now probe the issue of the missing safe, one of the many different aspects of the Benalla affair, which has dogged the presidency since the summer of 2018 when Alexandre Benalla was caught on video footage beating up a May Day demonstrator in Paris while passing himself off as a police officer.
The key questions are who moved Alexandre Benalla's gun safe from his Paris home, how and when they did so – and why. Up to now the answers to these questions - which have sparked all manner of speculation – remain unknown. Different and contradictory theories have been put forward by various media for 18 months. But up to now there has been no evidence establishing what really happened.
In a book which was published early in November Alexandre Benalla – whose words must be treated with some caution as the former presidential advisor has lied under oath on several occasions to the French Senate's committee of inquiry into the affair – sought to defuse this particular issue of the gun safe.
He suggested that he arranged for his gun safe – which he says contained only his legally-declared firearms – to be moved simply for safety reasons on July 19th 2018, the day after Le Monde's revelations about the MayDay violence. This was, he said, because the flat in the south-west Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux where he had lived until then with his wife and new-born child had been surrounded by journalists. “I asked some friends to make it secure after the start of the affair, fearing a 'burglary',” said President Macron's former advisor. In other words, moving the gun safe was not connected with the fact that the flat was searched the following day.
After it was moved the gun safe - which is around 60cm high – and its contents made their way to a flat owned by businesswoman Pascale Perez on Avenue Foch, which is just behind the Eiffel Tower in central Paris. This was the apartment where Alexandre Benalla and his family stayed during the summer of 2018.
During their preliminary investigation detectives traced the telephone signals of different people who were at or near the Issy-les-Moulineaux flat on July 19th, the day the safe was moved. As Le Parisien newspaper has revealed, Ludovic Chaker, a member of staff at the Elysée, and photographer Sébastien Valiela, a paparazzi who works with celebrity public relations expert Mimi Marchand, who is close to Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron, were both interviewed voluntarily by detectives during the summer. Both acknowledged they were at the flat on the day of the move but insist they were not involved in the moving of the gun safe.
Now that an investigating judge is involved, the investigation into the affair could also look at what happened to a second safe used by Alexandre Benalla. This was the one he kept in his office at the Élysée and whose contents were mysteriously removed before it was searched.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter