It was last July 12 shortly before noon. The operational center of the Finistère gendarmerie receives an anonymous call made from a cell phone. On the other end of the line, a male voice claims that an explosive device has been placed on the Tour de France route. A 48-year-old man, marginalized and with no criminal record, was sentenced to four months in prison on Tuesday by the Brest court after threatening to commit an attack against President Emmanuel Macron.
This 48-year-old trained engineer was on trial for “disclosure of false information in order to make people believe in dangerous destruction”. On the phone, he told the gendarmes: “It’s not a hoax, it’s the first summons. Macron must not appear at the podium on July 14, Mr. Macron is an imposter.” It only took a few hours for investigators to trace the author of the threatening call, located in Brest. The SIM card, activated less than an hour and a half earlier, was purchased the day before in a store where video surveillance images showed a man in makeup with a cap and surgical mask.
This act “is not neutral”
Tuesday on the stand, the defendant, father of two children, appeared calm. With a shaggy beard and a ring in his right ear, he claims to have acted on “a stroke of blood after weeks of discomfort”. “It was beyond me. Looking back, there is nothing consistent,” says the former senior executive and aid worker. Having passed through theaters of war such as Somalia, for several years he fell into a certain marginality and was late diagnosed with Asperger’s autism.
Described by a close friend as “an environmental but non-violent extremist”, he admits that his act was political but sees it rather as “a provocation”. “I felt concerned by the context and the social atmosphere, I saw no way out. At the end of the month, I only had a meager disabled adult allowance (…) I lost my bearings. »
Prosecutor Camille Miansoni, for his part, estimated that there was “preparation, something thought out”. And he asked for a solemn warning in the form of a simple reprieve, because this act “is not neutral”. The defense lawyer, Me Fabrice Quentin, insisted on the lack of dangerousness of the defendant, “a guy who lost his temper for exclusively personal reasons”.