Last month, the Paris public prosecutor’s office last month refused to open an investigation into the contradictory statements given by former senior French intelligence officers to the judicial investigation into the May 8th 2002 suicide car bomb attack on a coach carrying French naval engineers in the Pakistani port city of Karachi.
The blast, outside the Sheraton hotel from where the coach was about to leave, killed 11 of the 23 engineers on board the coach.
The engineers were from the French state-owned naval shipbuilding company DCN, and were in Karachi to help build three Agosta-class submarines sold by France to Pakistan in a contract signed in 1994.
Under French law, the French justice system can open an investigation into the murders of French nationals abroad, and a Paris-based investigation into the engineers’ murders is still ongoing 14 years after the events.
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Initially, the bombing was blamed by both the French and Pakistani authorities on al-Qaeda. But the French judicial investigation subsequently uncovered evidence suggesting that the massacre may have been in revenge for the non-payment of secret commissions promised by France to intermediaries when the submarine deal was struck.
Importantly, this complex case (see more here and here) involves dark political intrigue. The submarine deal, together with a separate naval weapons contract with Saudi Arabia, was signed by the government of conservative prime minister Édouard Balladur when he was secretly planning to launch a bid for the French presidency in elections due in 1995. Balladur ran as a rival candidate to fellow conservative Jacques Chirac, who was the official candidate of the RPR Gaullist party to which they both belonged.
Balladur lacked the funds that Chirac had as official RPR candidate, and evidence suggests that Balladur and his allies used the two weapons deals with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to siphon off large sums of cash destined for intermediaries. This was allegedly done by imposing intermediaries who were men of confidence on the deals and who, after receiving secret kickbacks paid by the French state, supposedly for helping seal the deal, returned a large part of the money to Balladur’s allies. These payments have become known as "retro-commissions".
The kickbacks were paid over time, and after Chirac finally beat Balladur in the 1995 elections he ordered, in 1996, outstanding commission payments organised by Balladur’s government to be halted. Chirac had been informed by intelligence reports that part of the money was destined to return to France to fund Balladur’s future political ambitions.
Balladur and former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who was Balladur’s budget minister when the arms deals were set up, and who became Balladur’s presidential election campaign spokesman, have both denied the existence of a kickback scam.
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But successive magistrates leading the marathon French judicial investigations into the case - and whose enquiries have regularly been hampered by official defence secrecy regulations - have collected compelling material evidence and witness testimony that such a system was in place, and that the halting of the payments was the motive for the attack on the engineers in Karachi in May 2002, which occurred just three days after Chirac was re-elected to a second term of office.
At the centre of the latest development in the case is the late Saudi Sheikh Ali Ben Moussalem, once an advisor to the Saudi royal family, who was found dead in Geneva in 2004. He was the head of the network of intermediaries imposed by the Balladur government to receive the kickbacks - notably the Paris-based businessman and arms broker Ziad Takieddine who would later serve Nicolas Sarkozy's entourage in their business dealings with Arab countries. It is estimated that after Chirac halted the payments in 1996 Ben Moussalem lost the equivalent of about 100 million euros that was still due to him.
In January 2002, a US treasury document, citing information from the CIA, reported that Ali Ben Moussalem had carried out indirect investment services for al-Qaeda, investing funds on behalf of Osama bin Laden and supplying ready cash sums to al-Qaeda upon demand.
According to some sources, Ben Moussalem had close links with the radical elements within the largest Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, which has been suspected of being involved in the Karachi killings as it has also been implicated in the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in February 2002.
Spy bosses 'want to silence the French investigations'
In 2013, Gérard Willing, a former collaborator with the French domestic intelligence service, the DST, now the DGSI, gave a statement to Judge Marc Trévidic who was then in charge of the judicial probe into the Karachi murders, in which he said Ben Moussalem had been the subject of an investigation by the agency between 1993 and 1995. Willing said that he was involved in the enquiries which revealed the links between the Saudi and Balladur’s political entourage. Willing gave the name of his DST handling officer as “Verger”.
But, when subsequently questioned by the judicial investigation, several former high-ranking DST officers - Éric Bellemin-Comte, Raymond Nart, and Jean-Jacques Pascal –denied Willing’s account, insisting that the agency had not carried out any investigation into Ben Moussalem.
Judge Tréveidic succeeded in tracking down “Verger”, who gave a statement confirming Willing’s, and in which he detailed how the DST discovered the very close contact between Ben Moussalem and Balladur’s close entourage.
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However, in June 2014, interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve wrote to Judge Trévidic to inform him that no document referring to the surveillance of Ben Moussalem existed in the domestic intelligence archives.
That prompted suspicions among several of the survivors of the Karachi attack who are civil parties to the case. They believe a plausible theory to explain the absence of any report on the surveillance is that the files were deliberately and secretly removed to hide the links between Ben Moussalem and Balladur’s entourage.
In April this year the lawyer for the civil parties, Marie Dosé, filed a complaint against “persons unknown” for giving “false statements” about the DST’s surveillance operation on Ben Moussalem. On May 12th, the public prosecutor’s office dismissed the complaint, arguing that the “contradictions” of witness testimony cited in the complaint “concern the management by the DST in 1994 of possible intelligence on the role of Mr. Ben Moussalem in the payment of retro-commissions, and not the circumstances of the terror attack of May 8th 2002”.
Dosé lodged an appeal against the public prosecutor’s decision on May 31st, in which she wrote: “Mr Ben Moussalem is suspected of having financed jihadist networks […] Exhorbitant commissions with no other interest than to finance the Republican Party and the presidential campaign of Mr. Edouard Balladur via retro-commissions were paid to this figure who was closely linked to the funding of terrorists. The decision of Mr. Jacques Chirac […] to put an end to the payment of these commissions was principally detrimental to Mr. Ben Moussalem, who increased pressure on France in order to see the engagements made by the latter were respected […] The ongoing investigation shows without any doubt that Mr. Ben Moussalem is at the heart of the Karachi affair.”
She added that the refusal to open an investigation into the “lying statements” given by former intelligence officers is felt by the survivors of the Karachi attack as demonstrating “an incontestable will to not take part in establishing the truth and to silence the French investigations into the key figure in what is called the Karachi attack”.
The appeal is lodged with the Paris appeals court branch of the public prosecutor’s office.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse