The gendarmes are busy finding a man who killed two people in a sawmill, near the village of Plantiers, in the south of France. – AFP
The investigation continues after the double murder in the Cévennes. The suspect, on the run for more than 48 hours, is “a loner”, “a man able to survive in a hostile environment,” the Nîmes prosecutor said Thursday, confirming the difficulty of a hunt led by 350 gendarmes.
However, Valentin M. does not have the profile of a survivalist or a paramilitary, insisted Eric Maurel, during a press conference organized in Saumane, a neighboring village of Plantiers (Gard), where this man from 29-year-old would have shot his boss and one of his colleagues on Tuesday morning in the sawmill where he was employed.
The fugitive is however “an individual who has a real dangerousness”
“We did not find in his personal documentation and on the computer level any relationship with a survivalist structure, no survivalism internship, no words showing that he adheres to the survivalist ideology,” insisted the Nîmes prosecutor. “He is not a follower of the survivalist ideology any more than a paramilitary,” he added.
The fugitive is however “an individual who has a real dangerousness, and one of the weapons which he has at his disposal”, a rifle equipped with a telescopic sight allowing to shoot with precision at several hundred meters, “is a weapon particularly devastating, ”insisted the magistrate. He said that a change had been noted in his behavior for a few days, stressing that he now came to work with a bulletproof vest.
“This individual trained very regularly in shooting”
General Philippe Ott, number 2 of the gendarmerie of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, for his part took stock of the military’s investigations on the ground, notably dismantling the hypothesis according to which the fugitive would have been heard pulling towards the village of Saint-André de Valborgne, north of Les Plantiers. “These detonations are perhaps rather the metallic banging of the rotors of the eight helicopters deployed to monitor the area,” he said. “Nothing comes to show that it was about the use of a firearm”, added the prosecutor Maurel.
One thing is certain, however: this sector of the Cévennes in which Valentin M. fled is “extremely complex to access, extremely dangerous and practically impractical at night”, insisted General Ott, showing his concern at the profile of the man. “This individual trained very regularly in shooting, and especially in long-range shooting, (…) and he may have positioned a combat post”, according to the gendarme.
“But we are convinced that it is not very far (…) and we do not think that he has an accomplice”, he specified, announcing that with the expected arrival of a squadron of mobile gendarmes and a tactical group of mobile gendarmes, there are now nearly 350 soldiers who are mobilized in this hunt.