Arrested at the beginning of the week, two men were indicted and placed under judicial supervision for having degraded the stele in memory of Simone Veil in Perros-Guirec (Côtes-d’Armor), announced this Thursday the prosecutor of Saint-Brieuc . “A judicial investigation was opened at the end of two police custody counts of aggravated degradations, aggravated public insults and incitement to hatred”, indicates in a press release the deputy prosecutor of the Republic of Saint-Brieuc, Antoine Loussot. The aggravating circumstance of the offenses against the two men “results from their racial character,” he said.
The two men are in their sixties, from Côtes-d’Armor, “without any conviction in their criminal record” or “link between them”, adds the prosecution. The first man, arrested Tuesday and placed in police custody, admitted to having “drafted and distributed” leaflets but denied having committed the degradations, “without evidence to confuse him for the time being”. According to a source close to the case, they were “hostile and offensive leaflets towards Simone Veil”. The second man, benefiting from a curatorship measure, “presented himself voluntarily” to the gendarmerie late Monday afternoon where he recognized the first acts of degradation committed on the stele.
Anti-Semitic Tags and Swastikas
Twice at the beginning of August, the stele had been soiled by jets of excrement or even mayonnaise. Then swastika tags were discovered on August 11. But the man did not recognize the facts as of August 14, specifies the prosecution. This time, anti-Semitic tags were discovered on the stele, according to a source familiar with the matter. These facts seem to fall under “another modus operandi” and remain “without an identified author” at this stage of the investigations, indicates the prosecution.
“The motive for their acts remains imprecise and will have to be analyzed in the light of the psychological and psychiatric expertise which will be requested”, specifies the deputy prosecutor. Judicial information “will aim, among other things, to carry out personality assessments and to look for possible complicity or co-perpetrators”. Installed on the forecourt of the town hall, renamed Parvis Simone-Veil, the granite stele was inaugurated in November 2017.