President Sarkozy brought up Tibherine Monks' affair to cover up botched arms' deal with Pakistan

In a bid to spare himself a damaging backlash from the bloody arms scandal involving France and Pakistan, French President Nicholas Sarkozy has ordered the reopening of the investigation into the kidnapping and brutal death of 6 French Monks in Algeria in 1996 ostensibly to divert attention from the French officials' grave lapses in the somber Pakistani affair. 

• Rumours have swirled for years around the kidnapping and decapitation of the Cistercian monks, which was blamed by authorities in Algiers and Paris on Islamist radical terrorists.
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•  So-called new evidence presented to an investigating judge in France by a retired French Army general suggests that the kidnapped monks may have been killed by accident by airborne Algerian soldiers who were trying to rescue them.
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• These allegations were rejected as utterly baseless by the Algerian authorities who asserted that the 6 French monks had been abducted and assassinated by GIA terrorists.
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• To the fury and amazement of the Algerian government, President Nicolas Sarkozy has decided to lift the French state secrecy which has surrounded the monks’ death for 13 years.
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• President Sarkozy announced that all possible assistance would be given to the investigating judge, Marc Trevidic. He called on the Algerian authorities – with whom the French President has acutely strained relations – to re-open their own investigation into the case.
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• Judge Trevidic is also at the heart of another sensitive “terrorist” investigation which recently took a dramatic turn.
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•  He and another judge let it be known last month that a bomb attack in Karachi which killed 11 French submarine engineers and four Pakistanis in May 2002 was not – as previously suggested – the work of Islamist terrorists.
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•  Instead, the two judges told families of the victims that it seemed likely that the bombing was planned by unknown Pakistani government figures who had been denied promised “commissions” on a large submarine contract with France.
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• The re-opening of both cases within three weeks may, or may not, be a coincidence, according to the British newspaper “The Independent”.
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•  The Pakistani affair, it said, could reflect badly on President Sarkozy who was part of the French government which approved the legal “commissions” in 1994.
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•  After a change of government, they were blocked by President Jacques Chirac in 1995 because he suspected that kick-backs had been paid to his French political rivals.
•  The scandal surrounding the deaths of the French monks could yet reflect badly on the former President Chirac, who was in power at the time.
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• The six monks were kidnapped by GIA terrorists on 26 April 1996. Their heads – but not the rest of their bodies – were found on 30 May.
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