PARIS: A senior policewoman claimed Sunday that France’s interior minister pressured her to alter a report into security at the Nice fireworks display where 84 were killed when a man rammed a lorry into the crowd.
But the minister, Bernard Cazeneuve — whose account of police deployments on the night of July 14 has already faced questions — hit back at the “grave accusations” and said he would sue for defamation.
Sandra Bertin, who is in charge of Nice’s system of security cameras, told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper she had been “harassed for an hour” by Cazeneuve on the phone after he sent a commissioner to see her.
She said she had been told to detail the presence of the local police at the Bastille Day fireworks event and also to report “that the national police had also been deployed at two points.”
“The national police were perhaps there, but I couldn’t see them on the video,” Bertin told the newspaper.
“He ordered me to put in (the report) the specific positions of the national police which I had not seen on the screen,” she was quoted as saying.
On Thursday, the left-leaning Liberation daily reported that only one local police car was barring the entry to the seafront pedestrian zone when Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel forced his lorry onto the Promenade des Anglais, mowing down families.
Since the carnage 10 days ago — the third major attack in France in 18 months — Cazeneuve has also been locked in an escalating row with the right-wing leaders of the Riviera city over claims of slack security.
President Francois Hollande was forced on Friday to say that he still had “full confidence” in his key minister, promising “truth and transparency” on the security measures that were in place.
French policewoman claims minister pressured her on Nice attack
French policewoman claims minister pressured her on Nice attack
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
