The paper of wreckage finally published an obit for Robert K. Brown. (Previously.)
Also among the dead: Paul Barril, French police officer turned “mercenary”.
In the gendarmerie, which in France is under the military, he joined a new military police intervention unit, the GIGN, in 1974. The French news media chronicled Mr. Barril’s reputation as an ultrafit top cop, a military-grade swimmer and diver, a black belt in karate, a parachutist, a hostage liberator and a policeman working inside and outside the law. With the GIGN, he participated in the 1979 operation against Islamist militants who had seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, taking dozens hostage.
In 1982, he became part of President François Mitterrand’s special antiterrorism police unit. That year, Mr. Barril was implicated in a murky affair in which he was alleged to have planted weapons and explosives in the apartment of Irish nationalists in Vincennes, near Paris. French judicial authorities dropped the court case in 2002 on legal technicalities.
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With another former colleague from the gendarmerie, Mr. Barril was “at the service of the principal despotic governments of Africa and the Middle East, under the forgiving eye of the French security services,” according to the 2021 book “The Empire That Won’t Die: A History of Françafrique,” written by a collective of historians, journalists and human rights activists.
The book called Mr. Barril and his former colleague “emblematic figures” of “Françafrique,” a term employed in France and Africa to designate the murky official and unofficial networks — military, financial and political — entangling France with its former colonies. In 1990, Mr. Barril, for instance, recruited 15 mercenaries to teach the police in Gabon how to use tear gas against demonstrators, according to the book.
He was also involved in Rwanda.
Mr. Barril didn’t deny being in Rwanda at the time of the genocide. During a search of the Paris offices of his company, the French authorities found a May 1994 contract signed by Mr. Barril and the Rwandan prime minister in which Mr. Barril committed to supplying the Hutu government with “20 men for training purposes,” “two million cartridges” of varying calibers, “shells and mortars” and “grenades.”
The contract, which noted a fee of $3.13 million, was a violation of the United Nations arms embargo on Rwanda, and it was evidence that his men were helping the killers.
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Mr. Barril always hinted to investigators that he had been acting under the indirect direction of President Mitterrand’s administration, which had been allied with Rwanda’s Hutu government.
But his former boss in the GIGN, Christian Prouteau, said in an interview that Mr. Barril’s claims were nonsense.
“He had no mission, despite what he pretended subsequently,” Mr. Prouteau said. “As soon as he left the gendarmerie, at no moment whatsoever did he have a mandate from France.”
“He passed from the light to the darkness,” Mr. Prouteau added.