Word: frenchness
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...disclosure comes weeks after a leak in a separate investigation into the deaths of 11 French naval engineers in a 2002 bomb blast in Pakistan. Initially blamed on Islamist extremists, the bombing, French investigators now believe, was likely the work of Pakistani military intelligence officials angry that France had stopped the payment of a kickback connected to a $1 billion submarine contract between Paris and Islamabad. (See a TIME video on Buddhist monks...
...inquiries in the hands of politically appointed state prosecutors. Citing a small number of high-profile instances in which judges have overstepped their investigative and detention powers, Sarkozy says he wants to reform France's inquisitorial justice system by moving it towards the more adversarial American and British model. French lawyers and judges are furious with the proposals, which they say will politicize the French system. "The intent of Sarkozy's plan is clear: to put investigations back under political control by eliminating the magistrate and putting prosecutors in charge," says Patrick Baudouin, who represents victims' families in the monk...
...when an Algerian army helicopter patrolling an area south of the capital, Algiers, opened fire on what soldiers thought was a terrorist encampment. The monks were among the corpses discovered there. When Buchwalter reported that news to his superiors, he said, he was ordered to remain silent to protect French-Algerian relations. "There are a lot of aspects of the official story that just don't stand up, including the fact that several alerts on the Algerian army's responsibility were never followed up," says a French counterterrorism official who confirmed to Time the existence of Buchwalter's testimony after...
...they could be exchanged for captured militants, a notion that perplexed terrorist experts more used to the GIA killing its enemies in well-planned strikes. Puzzlement grew when the GIA issued a second communiqué in May, saying that it had "slit the throats of the seven monks." Some French officials suspect Algerian secret-service officials had actually staged the abduction to further demonize the GIA in European eyes. The follow-up plan to free the monks in a "rescue operation," sources speculate, was ruined when unsuspecting regular-army forces attacked the suspected militants. Algerian leaders have emphatically denied...
News of Buchwalter's testimony has prompted others with knowledge of the case to go public. Former French anti-terrorism magistrate Alain Marsaud noted on July 7 that he, too, had alerted his superiors that an Algerian intelligence official had told him that the army had been responsible for the killings. That warning, Marsaud says, was "intentionally buried." Father Armand Veilleux, who in 1996 was procurator general of the Cistercian order in Rome, says he met stiff resistance from French officials in Algiers when he insisted on seeing the corpses - and was ultimately told only the heads had been recovered...