French politician calls for probe
June 26, 2009 PARIS (AFP) - French opposition leaders called Thursday for a parliamentary inquiry into the 2002 killing of 11 French engineers in Pakistan, after
reports of a link to a submarine contract with Islamabad.
According to a lawyer for the victims’ families, the probe into the May 8, 2002 attack in Karachi is now focusing on France’s decision to halt the
payment of commissions linked to a 1994 submarine deal.
The Socialist Party leader in parliament, Jean-Marc Ayrault, wrote to the parliament speaker calling for a fact-finding inquiry into the attack. “Seven
years after the events, it is time for our national representatives to look into these serious happenings,” Ayrault wrote. The attack saw a car packed
with explosives ram into a minibus carrying the Frenchmen, all engineers working for French state firm DCN, that was building submarines for
Pakistan. The 11 engineers and three Pakistanis were killed.
Two alleged members of an Al-Qaeda-linked group were convicted in Pakistan in 2003 over the Karachi attack, but both were acquitted last month
after court ruled there was insufficient evidence against them.
French anti-terrorism investigators are now focusing on whether the attack could have been commandeered as retribution after Paris called off the
payment of commissions to Pakistani intermediaries for the submarine deal.
The commissions - legal at the time, although since banned - were set up under Prime minister Edouard Balladur, but stopped after his political rival
on the right Jacques Chirac was elected president in 1995.
According to the families’ lawyer, Olivier Morice, Chirac is believed to have stopped the payments because part of the money was being siphoned off
to build an election campaign warchest for his rival Balladur.
Magali Drouet, daughter of one victim, says anti-terrorist judges believe the attack was ordered because payments were not made to Asif Ali Zardari,
who is now Pakistan’s president but was a minister at the time.
Details of the payments emerged in 2008 as part of an investigation into French arms sales.
Questioned last week about suggestions the attack could have been linked to commissions for the submarine deal, President Nicolas Sarkozy - who
was budget minister in Balladur’s government at the time - dismissed them as “grotesque.”
The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Monday there were “no objective elements” linking the attack to the submarine deal. Rachida Dati, who handed
over the French justice ministry to Michele Alliot-Marie in a reshuffle this week, said before standing down that “all steps will be taken to ensure we
find the truth.”