Jean-Louis Bruguière

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Jean-Louis Bruguière is the leading French investigating magistrate in charge of counter-terrorism affairs. He was appointed in 2004 vice-president of the Paris Court of Serious Claims (Tribunal de Grande Instance). He is somehow controversed for various actions, including the astounding indictment of Paul Kagamé, President of Rwanda, for the alleged assassination in 1994 of Juvenal Habyarimana. Washington Post journalist Dana Priest has cited him as saying that he had in the past ordered the arrest of more than 500 suspects, some with the assistance of US authorities ^[1]. According to the investigative reporter, who described the workings of Alliance Base, a CTIC joint counter-terrorist operations center, involving the DGSE, the CIA and other foreign intelligence agencies, Bruguière declared that "[he had] good connections with the CIA and FBI." ^[1]"

1 Biography
2 Rwanda
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Biography

The latest in a long line of magistrates (eleven generations), Bruguière studied at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and took part in the May 1968 protests. He continued his education at the École Nationale de la Magistrature. Appointed to Évreux, he made himself known through an affair involving illegal vehicle registration cards by naming the police director as the culprit. Appointed to Paris in 1976, he began an attack on local pimps (in particulier the Madame Claude network), eventually having to work under police protection.

Following street gunfire in 1982, Bruguière turned himself towards anti-terrorism, expanding his network and targeting in particular the far-left group Action Directe. In 1986 an anti-terrorism division was formed in Paris. A year later his apartment was targeted in a grenade attack; Bruguière, however, continued his fight. In 1994, he tracked down and captured one of the world's most wanted terrorists, Carlos (the Jackal).

Possibly his biggest case (in terms of number of people involved) was that of UT-772 in which six Libyans were successfully prosecuted in 1999 for the destruction of a French aircraft in 1989.

Bruguière counselled Italian senator Paolo Guzzanti (Forza Italia), in charge of the controversed Mitrokhin Commission, endorsing the old thesis, once supported by the CIA, according to which the Soviet Union was behind Mehmet Ali Agca's 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. The Mitrokhin Commission has been discredited following a manipulation by a network to defame Prime minister Romano Prodi and other political opponents of Berlusconi, by claiming they worked for the KGB. The network included Mario Scaramella, arrested in December 2006, the head of SISMI Nicolò Pollari, n°2 of SISMI Marco Mancini (both indicted in the Imam Rapito affair), as well as Robert Seldon Lady, CIA station chief in Milan, also indicted in the Imam Rapito affair^[2]^[3].

[edit] Rwanda

His controversial report into the April 1994 assassination of then Rwandan President, Juvenal Habyarimana and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, was made public on November 17, 2006 ^[4]. Brugière has indicted Paul Kagame, current President of Rwanda and leader of the FPR, claiming that he deliberately assassinated Habyarimana in order to provoke the genocide against his own ethnic group, in order to cynically take power. Bruguière's thesis has been very controversed, and criticized by Le Figaro, Libération and others newspapers. His investigations are based on two oral sources, one former member of the FPR who lives in exile, and Paul Barril, who was in charge of François Mitterrand's wiretap section at the Elysee Palace, and has had an obscure role in Rwanda before 1994. The Figaro, who points the international dimension of the character and his contacts with intelligence agents, both in Russia and in the United States, cited justice colleagues of Bruguière, who criticize him for "favorizing state reason over the law." ^[5].