A week after the fire in the Nantes cathedral, a volunteer from the diocese confessed and was remanded in custody overnight from Saturday to Sunday for “destruction and damage by fire”. The volunteer was taken into police custody on July 18 a few hours after the fire and the opening of the investigation, then released the following evening.
The investigators wanted to question him because after the fire no trace of break-in had been observed on the accesses to the building in which three starting points of fire had been observed. The "man" admitted, during the examination of the first appearance before the examining magistrate, having lit the three fires in the cathedral: on the large organ, the small organ and in an electrical panel ", specified the Nantes public prosecutor Pierre Sennès on a daily basis What do we know about the suspect?
"Eaten with remorse"
This 39-year-old man, indicted, is a "Rwandan, who came to take refuge in France a few years ago", explained last week the rector of Nantes cathedral, Father Hubert Champenois. He was responsible for closing the cathedral the day before the fire. According to the rector, who had indicated to have “confidence in himself as in all collaborators”, the volunteer was “serving as an altar”. The rector had known him "for four or five years".
Within the framework of this investigation, "more than thirty people" were heard and twenty investigators of the judicial police were mobilized, with in particular the reinforcement of the central laboratory of the prefecture of police of Paris, in order to determine the cause. of the fire, according to the prosecutor.
The volunteer faces ten years imprisonment
“My client cooperated,” the lawyer for the accused, Me Quentin Chabert, told the daily Presse-Océan. “He bitterly regrets the facts and talking about it was a liberation for him. My client is today consumed with remorse and overwhelmed by the magnitude of the events, ”he says.
The volunteer incurs for this offense "a ten-year prison sentence and a fine of 150,000 euros," said Pierre Sennés in an email sent overnight.
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Nantes cathedral fire: What we know about the disaster
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