It is a small USB key, but it is at the heart of the investigation into the killing on October 3 at the Paris police headquarters. The object was found in the office of Mickaël Harpon, the man who stabbed four of his colleagues. And since this discovery, a huge device has been put in place to try to obtain results as quickly as possible.
It is therefore no less than 160 investigators who are mobilized. Never since the attacks of November 13, the Parisian PJ had mobilized so many people on the same case. The criminal brigade was reinforced by dozens of volunteers from the other services of the "36". "We have made the choice, as at the time of the attacks of November 2015, to involve all the other central brigades, the financial services, to unload the criminal brigade," confirms Europe 1 Jean-Paul Mégret, deputy secretary general of the union police commissioners.
"Each investigator has several hundred emails to exploit"
160 investigators therefore, half of whom spend their time trying to unravel the mysteries of the famous USB key. Their mission: to make an inventory of all documents stored on this USB key, with particular attention for all names and personal data of intelligence officials, who fear for their safety and that of their family. "For this story that is extremely sensitive USB key, we mobilized a lot of people to be able to do this operation," says Jean-Paul Mégret. "Each investigator has several hundred emails to exploit, so they took turns between yesterday afternoon and all night, and our goal is to have a beginning of the beginning of the result normally at the beginning of the day. afternoon."
"It's a titanic job," says a PJ official. Because this 64 gigas key contains thousands of pages, photos and videos. It was used daily by the killer, as part of its computer maintenance work, to transfer content from one computer to another. "It is not excluded, that there are lists of police officers, with their personal address," warns an investigator. "But that does not mean that this list came out one day from the office where we found it".