Everything happened in barely an hour, like an acceleration of time. On November 2, 2013, Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon, special correspondents for Radio France Internationale (RFI), were kidnapped in the city of Kidal, in the north-east of Mali, executed at point blank range in the desert 12 km away, before their bodies were found by French soldiers who had gone in pursuit of the commando. The kidnappers vanished, abandoning their pick-up which had broken down. On board were immediately seized three mobile phones, the documents of the vehicle and its owner, fingerprints and DNA. While the assassination was claimed by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), all the armed forces were mobilized, including international ones, present in the area at the time: the United Nations Mission in Mali (Minusma) and, on the French side, Operation “Barkhane”, special forces soldiers and gendarmes.
But immediately afterwards, time slows down. Sometimes it even seems to stop. Thus, it was only in 2021 that the telephone data of the Malian operator Malitel, although discovered on the day of the tragedy, was transmitted to investigators from the anti-terrorist center in Paris. If certain numbers still remain unknown, belonging to Algerian companies which systematically refuse to cooperate with France, “these exploitations have made a considerable contribution: they have revealed the existence of a network of complicity larger than that of the six members identified – four members of the commando and two sponsors – so far”, reveals Marie Dosé, the lawyer of the association Friends of Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon during a press conference held on October 30, three days before the tenth anniversary of the assassination of the journalist and RFI technician.
“Betrayed.”
Thus, the telephone data first made it possible to establish that the RFI team was targeted and followed upon its arrival in Kidal, on October 29, 2013 in the early morning aboard a Minusma military flight. The hypothesis of opportunistic action should therefore be ruled out.
Complicity external to AQIM would also have been revealed, notably involving at least one member of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), the predominantly Tuareg independence group active in northern Mali, a region where faction memberships are fluctuating. Thus, it was while leaving an interview with an MNLA notable in Kidal that the journalist and the sound engineer were kidnapped. But it was this same notable who immediately alerted the French forces, while his son tried to chase the kidnappers. And if we needed to blur the lines a little further, the MNLA is, moreover, one of the local interlocutors of the French authorities. “The special envoys were betrayed,” Jean-Yves Le Drian, then minister of defense, reportedly confided in 2016 during a confidential interview with the association Les amis de Ghislaine Dupont et Claude Verlon. He will never say more.
To tell the truth, international actors are not rushing to help the investigation out of quicksand. Requested for its photos taken on the scene before and after the execution, Minusma dragged out the request interminably to end up claiming that it had no images. Internal investigations at the United Nations were reportedly carried out at the time of the events and then in 2017. None were communicated.
After several requests from the anti-terrorism center, around 200 documents were provided by the Ministry of Defense. But in the name of “defense secrecy”, “entire pages and passages would be missing or blackened, therefore unreadable. As a result, many of these documents would be unusable,” denounces Agnès Callamard, United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, in an official letter to Paris in 2021. According to her, “the lack of cooperation from the French military authorities” and “the worrying use of “defense secrecy”” would represent “an obstacle to the manifestation of the truth”.
” Theater scene “
At the heart of the case therefore remains a still unsolved enigma: why were Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon executed rather than used as bargaining chips? Main hypothesis: the kidnappers’ pick-up having broken down, they would have made the decision to kill their hostages before fleeing, knowing that armed forces were on their trail. On the sidelines of an interview in December 2013, François Hollande, then at the Elysée, would have mentioned “off the record” a phrase captured on wiretaps after the death of the two French people. A sponsor would criticize a member of the commando for having “spoiled the goods”.
This same line would have been repeated five years later by a director of the intelligence services to two journalists. Summoned by the investigating judge, the ex-president and the ex-director each claimed not to remember it. A request for confrontation, demanded by the civil parties, was definitively rejected in 2020. Ten years have passed, the time to testify has arrived, ask the families and relatives while only an alleged member of the commando and a sponsor are still believed to be in custody. life.
Another pitfall for the manifestation of the truth: the cooperation between magistrates from Paris and Bamako, initially fruitful, according to lawyer Marie Dosé, ceased in 2022 with the intensification of the diplomatic crisis between the two countries.
In one of her latest reports, Ghislaine Dupont recounted her arrival in Kidal in 2013. “A desert landscape heated white by the sun, that’s Kidal. Squares and rectangles of stone emerge from the sand, these are the houses like a set on a theater stage. » Then, later: “Disintegration of the State, lack of development, irresponsible elites, Kidal is the square power of Mali’s ills. » And Reporters Without Borders (RSF) concludes: “No journalist now has access to this Sahel region, the size of Europe and populated by 110 million inhabitants. It has become an information black hole. »
