Cherbourg paid a first tribute on Sunday to the victims of the attack in Karachi (Pakistan), 20 years to the day after the tragedy which claimed the lives of 15 people, Norman workers working for the ex-DCN for the most part.

“We express on behalf of all the employees of the Naval Group site [ex-Direction des constructions navales] in Cherbourg our still intact emotion”, declared Jean-Luc France, director of the factory during a ceremony organized. Sunday morning inside the nuclear submarine manufacturing site.

Jean-Luc France then laid a wreath "to our missing colleagues" in front of a plaque on which the names of the 11 deceased French workers are engraved.

15 people dead, including 11 French

About forty people, mainly relatives of the victims or survivors seriously injured in the attack were present, AFP noted.

" I am deeply hurt.

It destroyed my life, my children,” Marie Dupont, widow of one of the victims, who came to the ceremony with her three children and several of her grandchildren, told AFP.

"I can't take it anymore," she added when asked about the investigation that has been going on for 20 years without the motive for the attack being clearly identified.

On May 8, 2002, 15 people died in the explosion of the bus which daily took employees of the Naval Construction Department (DCN) and its subcontractors from their hotel to the construction site of a submarine sold in Pakistan by the DCN.

Twelve people were seriously injured.

Two lines of inquiry

Two avenues are now being explored by investigators.

Initially, only that of Al-Qaeda was explored.

Since 2008, the judges have also been studying the trail of an attack organized in retaliation for the decision of the President of the Republic Jacques Chirac to stop paying commissions to Pakistani officials on arms contracts concluded by the Balladur government in 1994. According to victims' lawyers, judges today favor this second hypothesis.

“We must pay tribute to those who have disappeared.

We have 11 innocent people who paid for politicians who filled their pockets,” said a survivor of the attack who was interviewed by AFP on condition of anonymity after attending the ceremony at Naval Group. .

"In this attack our colleagues were victims of the arms trade and its financialization", also estimated the CGT of the Naval Group site in Cherbourg in a press release.

In 2020 the Paris Criminal Court ruled that part of the illegal kickbacks helped finance Edouard Balladur's campaign.

But the judges did not rule on a possible causal link between the stoppage of the payment of commissions and the attack in Karachi.

Edouard Balladur was acquitted by the Court of Justice of the Republic, his ex-minister François Léotard condemned.

Bernard Cazeneuve present

A second ceremony is planned for the afternoon, organized by the town hall in front of a monument in memory of the victims located behind the Cité de la mer in Cherbourg and to which more people are expected, but without a representative of the State.

In Cherbourg, large tarpaulins invite the inhabitants to go there.

In the middle of the morning, a white rose had been placed in front of the stele which also contains the names of the eleven French people who died in the attack, AFP noted.

One of the injured, who is boycotting the two ceremonies, said he dropped it off on Sunday morning.

Several injured or relatives of victims accuse the State of "blocking" the investigation by refusing to lift the defense secret on a number of documents, and boycott the ceremony organized each year by Naval Group

.

The former PS deputy mayor of Cherbourg, Bernard Cazeneuve, who had denounced the state's "impediments" to the emergence of the truth, was announced at the second ceremony.

In 2002, the DCN was 100% owned by the State.

It has since become Naval Group, 62% owned by the state.

Nearly 5,500 people work at the group's Cherbourg site.

Justice

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Justice

Edouard Balladur released, Léotard sentenced in the Karachi case

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