A trial that promises to be resounding… The number two of the Bordeaux judicial police was sent back to the Paris Criminal Court for complicity in drug trafficking, in an investigation into suspicions of drift in the fight against drugs, said Friday a judicial source, confirming information from Release.
Alongside Commissioner Stéphane Lapeyre, eight other defendants will be tried, including another police officer, also dismissed for complicity in drug trafficking, according to this source.
Start of the business in 2013
Stéphane Lapeyre “is accused of having set up a cocaine importation to make money, with the help of his subordinate and several informants”, when he was still head of the operational division of OCRTIS (Central Office for repression of illicit drug trafficking) in Paris, wrote Release.
The case began in 2013 with “a banal investigation into drug trafficking”, during which the police will wiretap a man “suspected of importing cocaine from Guyana by sending the goods to the freight of the ‘Orly airport’.
Questioned, he evokes the role of a man in “the security of the passage in customs”. The investigators will then discover that this man is an informant of the Office of narcotics which has as agents Stéphane Lapeyre and his subordinate.
Controversial links between police and “indicators”
The cocaine arrived in France “thanks to the narcotics police who asked customs as part of a controlled delivery”, a police technique which consists in letting drugs pass at the borders to better dismantle the resale networks, details the daily. Problem, it was not mentioned anywhere in the procedure.
This case echoes the investigation targeting the former boss of the anti-narcotics office François Thierry, who is indicted for complicity in drug trafficking. This file, concerning in particular the controversial links between police and “indicators”, shook the anti-drug system and led to the replacement of OCRTIS (Central office for the repression of illicit drug trafficking) by Ofast (Anti-drug office). narcotics) in 2019.
Contacted by AFP, his lawyer Me Thibault de Montbrial has not responded for the moment. The lawyer for the other police officer, Me Anne-Laure Compoint, indicated that she did not wish to comment.