Loïc Le Ribault - The French Authorities Keep Up the Chase

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Earlier this year the French authorities were finally successful in pulling off an international arrest warrant which landed Loïc Le Ribault in prison in Switzerland where he was then extradited to a prison in France. Martin Walker offers a brief introduction to Loïc's thank you letter to his supporters following his release from prison.

Loïc Le Ribault's Recent Imprisonment - History and Current Context

by Martin Walker

Throughout the nineteen eighties, Loïc Le Ribault was the most important and renowned forensic scientist in France. He solved hundreds of murder cases for the gendarmerie and for the magistracy. The equipment which he developed, based mainly on sample collecting and their examination under an electron microscope, could have put the French police into the vanguard of crime prevention and solution. However, powerful forces did not want to give Loïc credit for his work or his techniques. Loïc's work frequently revealed that routine police forensic work in France was inefficient, corrupt and inept and secondly, some government officials were loath to have Loïc take the glory for re-organising the forensic science procedures of the police force.

Loïc was still being called in to cases by independent judges and magistrates during the late eighties, but it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to work officially. One of the cases he was given, was that of the young Irish back packer Trevor O'Keeffe who had been murdered and then buried in France in August 1987. This case was to be one of the last that Loïc dealt with, before continuous obstruction and pressure of different kinds forced him to shut down his independent laboratories and turn his hand instead to his other great love, the development of organic silica.

Loïc's work on organic silica, led him to produce it in quantity and to distribute it as a treatment for arthritis. When his treatment proved an enormous popular success, the medical establishment in France organised against Loïc and he was eventually arrested and imprisoned on trumped up charges of practising medicine without being a medical doctor. When he was released from prison, Loïc fled France. This part of Loïc's life is described in my booklet Loïc Le Ribault's Resistance.

It was not long, however, before Loïc was writing autobiographical books, not only about the attempts to stop him manufacturing and treating people with organic silica, but also about the French Ministry of the Interior, famous cases which he had worked on and the inefficiency of the French police. He also began a case against the French Government to be brought before the European Court of Human Rights.

When Loïc settled in Ireland at the end of 1998 the media picked up on his strange background and his development of organic silica. Word also spread that he was the forensic scientist who had investigated the death of Trevor O'Keeffe. A journalist put him in touch with Trevor's mother. Ever since Loïc was asked to report on the murder ten years before, he had tried to contact Mrs O'Keeffe without success. When in November 1998, Loïc was introduced her, he was able to give her the full forensic report which he had prepared for his instructing judge in 1997 and which she had not seen. This report made absolutely clear that Pierre Chanal, a French soldier, was the prime suspect for the murder of Trevor and other victims, some of whom were also soldiers. Loïc was unable to say how many people Chanal had killed, suggesting that it might have been between ten and fifty.

The French authorities had been strangely ambivalent about indicting Chanal, charging him with only minor charges relating to the abduction of a young man that the police had found imprisoned by Chanal on his arrest. Chanal was imprisoned without trial on the murders which Loïc had come close to proving against him. This of course did not do justice to the relatives of those murdered, although it did keep secret the bungling ineptitude and obfuscation of the French police concerned about the image of their armed forces.

During 1989 and 1999, Loïc and Eroline began campaigning for the full disclosure of evidence in the case of Trevor O'Keeffe. At around the same time, Loïc pushed ahead with his case against the French government which his lawyer had prepared to go to the European Court of Human Rights.

In 1995, a new judge had taken over Chanal's case and ordered, for the first time, forensic tests which had previously been denied both Loïc and the family. In January 1999, a DNA analysis of hairs found by Loïc, almost ten years earlier in Chanal's car, revealed that he was definitely the murderer of at least two young hitch hikers. And a new independent forensic report also came to the same conclusion as Loïc's that the soil on the spade found in Chanal's car was the same as that found where Trevor O'Keeffe had been buried.

As a consequence of the independent investigations of the newly appointed judge and the campaigning of Loïc and Trevor O'Keeffe's family, Chanal was finally due to be arraigned for trial in October 2003. At the end of September 2003, Loïc was happily settled in Ireland where he had set the production of organic silica. With the date set for the Chanal trial, Loïc was requested to return to France and attend. The French government and their secret services were, however, to work hard in ensuring that Loïc never entered France for the purposes of offering his evidence, either in the Chanal case or in his defence on the various charges in relation to medicine which hung over him.

Although at first sight, it might appear that Loïc was being pursued by French government agencies mainly, or only, because he could cause serious embarrassment to the French police and the Ministry of the Interior, we should not consider his pursuit by the French medical establishment as a lesser matter.

Loïc says in his book The Cost of A Discovery, published in 2003:

'I explained to Eroline O'Keeffe and her sister Noeleen, that an international arrest warrant had been issued against me, officially for the illegal practice of medicine, but in reality because of my involvement with the police forensic services, and most of all over the Chanal case, for which I had official and written proof that expert reports prepared by the police laboratory in Lille had been completely and deliberately falsified.'

While this explanation appears to make the case brought against Loïc by the medical authorities an excuse rather than a practical reality, the truth is that for some seven or eight years, with his development, production and massively popular distribution of organic silica, Loïc did become a threat to the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical companies in France. In fact, Loïc became a dissident in two overlapping areas of French society and it is probably for both these lives, equally, that he now finds himself in life long exile from the country of his birth.

Loïc Le Ribault - Letter to his Supporters

Switzerland, 23rd March 2004 Translation: Emma Holister

Thank you !

Thank you everyone, friends whom I know and whom I don't know, who wrote to me when I was in prison, to the Association of Friends of Loic Le Ribault, to reviews and papers that supported me during this ordeal. There were thousands of you, and I still haven't been able to answer you all. But it is vital that you know that your action probably saved my life. For it truly seems that this time, everything had been organised down to the finest detail in order to get rid of me once and for all. Judge for yourselves.

In March 2004 I was just about to enter my ninth year of exile. Eight years had passed in the absolute certainty that there were certain figures hidden within the woodwork of many Ministries who had not forgotten me: eight years of exhausting nervous tension with a Damocles sword hanging over my head, that was bound to strike one day. But when? And how? Especially since Pierre Lance's book (1) and the TV documentary by Jean-Yves Bilien (2) that recounted my adventure were most upsetting to the French authorities.

It was an emergency that brought them out of the woodwork and into an attack: the famous Chanal case, otherwise known as the "disappeared of Mourmelon". It is known that in 1988 I had provided the physical and indisputable proof that it was Chanal's spade that had been used to dig the hole in which the body of the young Trevor O'Keeffe had been found in 1987. Chanal, strangely protected, wasn't worried in the least about this. Then in 1998 I had provided the no less irrefutable proof that in this case the police laboratories had concocted false expert reports with the aim of discrediting me.

However, Chanal's court case was to finally begin in October 2003 and I received from the Court of Appeals of Reims a request to appear before them on 16th October as an expert. I was delighted: it was the chance I'd dreamed of to publicly demonstrate the Ministry of the Interior's compromise of principle in this case. Certain as I was of being immediately arrested if I were to set foot in France, I suggested that I give evidence via a video conference and the court magistrate accepted my proposal.

For those hidden in the woodwork it was a blow. It was necessary, at all costs, to silence me or to at least sully my reputation by all means possible.

First of all, on 23rd of August, they did me the honour of issuing an international arrest warrant against me. They were aided by the press; The Irish Times 23rd August (Hmm? The same date as that of the arrest warrant?); The Express on 11th September, and an Irish tabloid that, as of 29th August, published my personal address, after which, following the day the article appeared, I began receiving death threats on the phone.

On 1st October 2003, the date of my court case was finally confirmed, after seven years (!) of preparation: it was to be on 5th February 2004 in Bordeaux.

On 2nd October 2003, the European Court of Human Rights informed me that my petition against the French State was unacceptable, that the decision was definitive, that none of my letters would be answered and that my dossier would be destroyed.

During the night of Tuesday 14th to Wednesday 15th October 2003 Chanal apparently committed suicide whilst he was under the supposed continued surveillance of three police officers, and was undergoing a medical control every fifteen minutes. Consequently Chanal would not be talking . . . and neither would I.

Now it was time for those hiding in the woodwork to seriously take care of me.

Since the beginning of October I had been in Switzerland where I was preparing to set up a research laboratory. I was not at all in hiding, since I lived under my real name in various hotels, with the passport that had, moreover, been delivered to me by the French Embassy in Dublin in 2001.

It was therefore following a denunciation that, on 21st November at 8:25, four Swiss police officers broke into my hotel bedroom. They acted in accordance with the international arrest warrant issued against me, but were unaware of the reason. In their eyes, for such a measure to be justified, I could only have been a very dangerous individual. I immediately rejected my extradition, which the French Embassy in Switzerland had demanded right away. I informed the police officers of the charges issued against me, and they were astounded: how could the illegal practice of medicine and pharmacy justify the issue of an international arrest warrant, which is principally reserved for extremely serious cases? What was it hiding? Almost as suspicious as I was, they asked for a copy of the warrant from France. They received it by fax, accompanied by a confidential document that had as a heading the following sentence: "The contents of this paper are nothing more than information that may be used to help the inquiry. They cannot be referred to unless having first been verified."

In the section entitled "past history" was written "nothing", in the paragraph "Education" that I had no profession, and that my last known address was . . . the prison in Gradignan, in 1997.

The portrait thus described was not at all to my advantage, and got worse in the following paragraph, preceded by the sentence: "This person has been cited in the following case(s), but in no event can it be deduced from this document that he has definitely been recognized as responsible for them . . ." There, it was indicated that I had admitted being guilty of four counts of breach of trust, of which the "judicial conclusions" were totally "unknown", and the "implication" left "blank". But the most incredible case involved the "sending of a cheque from a closed account" that I was apparently guilty of in Arcachon on 7th January 1997. However, on that date I had been locked up in Gradignan prison for three weeks and would not be released till six weeks later. No doubt about it, I was more cunning than Arsène Lupin . . .

In brief, this far from brilliant portrait concocted by the French Ministry of the Interior did not in the least incite the clemency of the Swiss justice system.

That very evening therefore, I slept at the Champ-Dollon prison, on the outskirts of Geneva.

Compared to my French cell, n° 124 in 1996/1997, its Swiss sibling, n° 258, seemed to me to be an un-hoped-for luxury: a private cell of around 12 m2, clean, equipped with a toilet room and a window free of bars, with a view over Mont Blanc. As the days went by I discovered and appreciated the perfect courtesy of the prison personnel. The cooking was excellent (four menus to choose from), I was allowed to walk for one hour a day in a mesh cage perched on the roof of the prison, to take a shower daily, to have access to superfluous items (food shop, newspapers, paper suppliers, etc.) from a catalogue of thirty or so pages provided by the penitentiary administration, and to watch colour TV. All of which makes incarceration relatively tolerable . . .

But every coin has another side, as is well known. For some mysterious reason I was suddenly put into solitary confinement until 22nd December. I was not allowed to receive guests, to send mail, to benefit from the slightest visit, with the (rare) exception of my Swiss lawyer. For me the outside world no longer existed, and the anxiety increased day by day. Had my friends been notified of my arrest? Was anyone protesting? Or had I been erased from the world of the living?

In the days that followed, the French authorities officially confirmed the accusations of swindling and the introduction onto the market of a toxic product, thereby justifying my being held in detention by the Swiss authorities. I had become a swindler as well as a potential poisoner.

After one month the circumstances improved: one authorised hour-long visit per week, but recorded and in the presence of a warder. The mail began to arrive, a breath of fresh air and hope. But, of course, it was censored on arrival and on departure. The Berne authorities refused to give me back my laptop computer and my address book, considered as they were to be articles of a capital conviction. But how could there have been articles of conviction when the preparation for my trial had been finished in France? The proof: the date for my trial had been confirmed! What did that mean? Was there a new preparation in process that I was totally unaware of?

And indeed it seemed that was the case: for on 8th January, whilst reading a file that had come fresh from the French authorities to justify their insistence concerning my extradition, I discovered an extremely worrying sentence: (. . .) "It is to be noted that another judicial case has been opened (against me) by the Bordeaux Prosecution for the period following the cases concerned by the current file and that the judge preparing the case for an eventual judgment envisages delivering an international arrest warrant with the aim of obtaining an extension of the extradition for these new cases" Amongst the 135 pages of the file, these few little lines turned my blood to ice: I had now become such a dangerous individual that these new misdeeds (unspecified) justified another international arrest warrant!

Alerted, my lawyer, Maître Blet, inquired at the Bordeaux Prosecution, who gave him the name of the judge in charge of the preparation of the trial. The judge, when questioned, almost fell off his chair: he hadn't been informed!

Obviously, it was well and truly a newly arranged coup, so enormous that the French authorities did not hesitate to lie to the Swiss Federal judicial authorities! "They" really wanted my head on a plate, and I persisted in my refusal to be extradited.

It was the next day, in prison, that I began to receive the hundreds of letters from senders who were nearly all unknown to me. Soon there were thousands. I realized at that point that my case had raised a veritable indignation and that I could count on the support of a multitude of sympathisers. How many people on Earth could boast of having so many friends at their side? Above all friends who were disinterested, because after all, my disappearance wouldn't bring about that of G5, which, despite my incarceration, continued to be manufactured and distributed from Ireland as before. I was therefore not really indispensable. However, thousands of people took the time to write to me in order to support me without expecting any advantage in return. So every evening, whilst contemplating the wall of my cell pasted with postcards, I felt that I was a lucky man.

But the fateful 5th February was approaching fast, and it took all the persuasion of my closest friends and my lawyer, Maître Blet, for me to decide to accept extradition.

It was on the evening of 3rd February that the Swiss police handed me over, handcuffed, to the French police. Considering that the Swiss police had been negligent in handcuffing me with my hands in front of me, the French police were quick to handcuff me with my hands behind my back and, armed, took me in the car, with my laptop computer and baggage (three travel bags) to Bonneville prison.

As the prison was overcrowded, I spent the first night of this touching reunion with gentle France sleeping on the floor without having eaten. It was not a good sign that the future would go well . . .

The next day the French police were assigned to be my escort, again by car. Once they had removed my belt and shoelaces they handcuffed me with my hands in front of me, pointing out that they were gallant gentlemen to do so as this was just a gesture of tolerance. According to them, the ruling was to handcuff with the hands behind the back. As these poor souls were very tired, they didn't overexert themselves by bringing along my baggage that remained at the Bonneville prison, which I left without a change of clothes or having eaten, once again. Fortunately, this deprivation did not affect the police officers, who left me famished in a squad cell in Tulle in order to go and eat at a restaurant in town. Ten hours later, I found myself once more, with no great joy and with an empty stomach, in Gradignan prison, which I had left eight years earlier. It was one o'clock in the morning on 5th February, the day of my trial.

I was to remain locked up in Gradignan for twenty days, and those twenty days were 1 700 000 seconds of deep anxiety. Not because of what went on in the prison. Quite the opposite: I enjoyed much moral support not only from the warders, but also from the prisoners. The prisoners were dismissive of the legal expert and only cared about the discoverer of G5, and they never missed an opportunity to express their indignation: "We're here for good reason. But you, what the hell are you doing here! It's disgusting!" No. The anxiety was to do with what was being hatched outside.

It was at 2:30 pm that I arrived at the Bordeaux court of justice. There, I was welcomed warmly by the police officers who were outraged by my treatment and insisted on offering me some sugar water to help me deal with the shock. They also gave me a piece of string to use as a belt to keep my trousers up.

Then I was thrown into the arena, or rather into a cage of bullet-proof glass. After all, wasn't I dangerous? The public stands were packed and there was a ripple of applause on my arrival, rapidly hushed by the lady magistrate. The court was composed almost exclusively of female members (a nightmare for any male standing accused), the magistrate was accompanied by two puppet magistrate assistants who didn't open their mouths at all, and Maud Vignau, public prosecutor, who on the other hand, opened hers too often.

What is there to say of my trial other than that it was a parody of justice? I had already been subjected to five months imprisonment, so the punishment that awaited me could not be less than six months. If the opposite were to be the case, surely, I would be in a position to demand damages and interest from the French State for abusive imprisonment. In fact, I hardly heard the magistrate, whose questions revealed a total lack of awareness of the case and gross scientific ignorance.

What was most interesting was the behaviour of Maud Vignau, deputy-prosecutor (she was a substitute). Throughout my entire career as an expert I had in fact only ever met magistrates of integrity, solely concerned with the work of revealing the truth. Otherwise they, of course, would not have asked for my services. In this case I was brutally forced to behold a totally different face of justice: that of a magistrate who was not standing, not sitting, but lolling sadistically. For me, in my naivety, the role of a prosecutor was, naturally, to point out the "errors" of the accused, but without any deliberate lies. I had been truly mistaken: Maud Vignau existed! I know this, because I met her on that day, 5th February 2004.

Speaking in the name of the French people, she was guilty of the following in her closing speech for the prosecution: lies (I had stolen inventions from the French police force), ignorance (G5 was a glass of "water" (sic) into which one threw a grain of sand), crudeness (I was a charlatan), insults (she compared me to the miracle doctor in the children's cartoon Lucky Luke), dishonour (a letter of congratulation from Jacques Chaban-Delmas was turned into an example of how I "made corpses speak"), stupidity and arrogance (my patients were "suckers"). At the end of this stream of venom, she finally imposed a gigantic fine and two years' imprisonment. To behave in such a dishonourable way, Maud Vignau must be a very sad person indeed...

The verdict having been deferred for deliberation, I was driven back for a week's imprisonment and then, as was expected, condemned to pay a fine of 8000 euros and to undergo one year's prison sentence with a six months suspended prison sentence for the illegal practice of medicine and pharmacy. I was of course cleared of the accusations of fraud and the sale of a toxic product.

The law gives ten days for an eventual appeal. It's what condemned prisoners call "les jours du proc.", so I left for Gradignan for ten days. Since it was 12th February, ten full days would take us to Sunday 22nd February. The tradition of Gradignan being, apparently, to never release a prisoner on a Sunday, but rather on the Saturday preceding it, I thought I'd be released on the 21st. This was also the opinion of the guards, who, on Friday 20th, told me that my departure was scheduled for the following day. The next day they regretted to have to inform me that I would in fact be leaving on Monday morning, Sunday not being counted as a day of my time since it was not an open day. This was apparently a first, and I began to get very seriously worried.

On the 23rd, Monday, the head supervisor, looking very apologetic, warned me that, for reasons he did not understand, my departure had been deferred to Tuesday morning. Around midday, he came back, thunderstruck, and informed me that after having checked the prison computer he had just noticed that in fact my release had been arranged for . . . the 17th March! In three weeks' time! What could that mean? I had already served five and a half months solid prison time. Tradition (always held to) required that a prisoner who was well known to be of good behaviour benefit from one week's relief of his sentence for every month of imprisonment undergone. In other words, a man condemned to six months' prison serves "only" four and a half.

As for me, I had been given a particular treat, since according to this calculation, I had already been subjected to one month of prison too long. The date 17th March could only therefore correspond to a sentence, from the outset, well beyond six months, in other words another sentence! That Monday 23rd February, I was truly frightened, for I clearly remembered the "other case" I'd been through that had been issued by the Bordeaux Prosecution to the Swiss authorities. Which meant that not only did "they" not wish to release me, but that I was certain of remaining for a very long time behind bars.

However, that evening a smiling supervisor announced to me "that the decision had been made" to release me the next morning, 24th February and that the date 17th March "had disappeared from the screen". What, therefore, had happened between Friday and Monday? A mystery.

I could find only one logical explanation: "they" had firmly decided to make a new charge against me. One that would discredit me. But "they" had not had the time to get together a file, a false one of course but cast in iron, because "they" had forgotten to subtract my two weeks' relief of sentence owing to my time spent in detention in Switzerland! The proof: just after my departure I was to learn that, on Saturday 21st, my lawyer, Maître Blet, must have been battling with the judge who issued the sentences in order to prise that blessed sentence relief out of him that was legally due to me, but that he did not want to allow me . . .

And furthermore - and above all - "they" were no doubt very surprised about the scale of your support, my dear friends, and worried about the eventual consequences of a renewed proof of judicial harassment towards me.

It was therefore on the morning of 24th February that the doors of the detention centre opened at last and that I left, swept up by an enormous ovation: 600 prisoners applauded my liberation and wished me good luck.

It took me a whole month to learn how to walk normally again and to get used to the crowds in the streets and shops. That month of re-education I spent in Switzerland, towards whom I hold no resentment and where I feel at ease. From the other side of Lake Leman I occasionally looked at the French mountains. With total indifference.

It is a country that I will never set foot in again.
Thank you once again, my friends!

Loïc Le Ribault

P.S : In two months time my personal website will be launched
( www.loicleribault.com ) and we can talk.

(1) Pierre Lance - Savants maudits, chercheurs exclus - Éditions Trédaniel.
(2) Jean-Yves Bilien et Pantxo Arretz - Mandat d'arrêt contre un chercheur (Satya Productions)

 

---

mandato da Robin Good il Saturday December 4 2004
aggiornato il Wednesday November 8 2006

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