A star witness for the French police in the Tarnac Nine court case against anarchists accused of railway terrorism has recanted his testimony and accused police of misrepresenting and pressuring him into condemning his friends.
Jean-Hugues Bourgeois, a farmer who lives next door to the commune in which the Tarnac Nine live, was used by police as a major plank in their case against the accused.
It was his deposition, which he says he signed without reading, which accused the Tarnac Nine of having “little regard for human life” in an alleged plot to sabotage high-speed train lines which saw them arrested in 2008.
At the time, Bourgeois’s farm was the victim of attacks, and he was in contact with the police of Riom. On 12th November 2008, the warrant officer in charge of the case contacted him, while the surveillance of the people questioned in Tarnac was in course. The officer knew that Bourgeois including them among his friends and regularly saw them.
The officer brought him to the Riom police station where SDAT officers brought specially from Paris awaited him. His interview lasted nine hours. According to someone close to Bourgeois, it was an ordeal. He came home in shock. As if he’d been the ‘victim of an attack’.
The admission came just a day after it was revealed that in a raid on another Tarnac-related arrest police had held guns to the heads of four and six-year old children.
