Controversial French ex-police commando probed over Rwanda dies aged 80
His death late Tuesday was confirmed to AFP by the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN), the elite intervention unit of the French gendarmerie which acts against terror threats and protects top officials which he co-founded in 1974.
This file photograph taken on December 14, 2004 shows former French gendarme captain Paul Barril, a defendant in an presidential eavesdropping case, arriving at a courthouse in Paris. (Photo by AFP)
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A French police commander who helped quell a 1979 Islamist uprising in Mecca, founded an elite unit of the gendarmerie but later faced a probe over alleged involvement in the Rwanda genocide, has died aged 80, his former force said Wednesday.
Paul Barril had been suffering from Parkinson's disease. His death late Tuesday was confirmed to AFP by the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN), the elite intervention unit of the French gendarmerie which acts against terror threats and protects top officials which he co-founded in 1974.
In 1979 he led a small team of French commandos who were sent to Saudi Arabia at Riyadh's request to end the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by hundreds of Islamist militants. With their help, Saudi authorities regained control.
But he picked up severe injuries in a training accident in 1983 and also became implicated in several scandals that shadowed French politics at the time.
He was accused in 1982 of planting arms and explosives at the suburban Paris home of three suspected Irish nationalists fighting the UK government for a united Ireland, in order to justify their arrest.
And in 2004 he went on trial with 11 former government officials and senior police officers accused of running a phone-tapping operation used by Mitterrand to keep tabs on his personal enemies, media threatening to publish the story of his secret daughter, and even the actress and Chanel model Carole Bouquet. He was handed a six-month suspended sentence and 5,000-euro fine.
The most significant legal probe against Barril came closer to the end of his life when he was repeatedly questioned by an investigating magistrate on accusations of having struck a multi-million-dollar arms deal with Rwanda's interim government at the height of the country's 1994 genocide.
Human rights groups, including the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), had lodged a complaint against Barril, prompting an investigation into "complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity".
An estimated 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, were killed in the April-July 1994 genocide by ethnic majority Hutus.
According to the groups, Barril made around $1.2 million on the arms deal which allegedly entailed the supply of vast amounts of ammunition, shells, mortars and grenades. He denied any involvement in the Rwandan genocide and was never convicted.