Tibhirine Monks' lawyer urged President Hollande to pressurize President Bouteflika!

The lawyer of the families of the murdered French Tibhirine Monks, Patrick Baudouin, called on French President Francois Hollande ahead of his visit to Algeria which took place on Monday June 15th to convince his Algerian counterpart Abdellaziz Bouteflika to speed up investigations into the case of the assassination of the 6 monks “claiming as usual that the Algerian side are responsible for obstructing the investigation”, as he put it.

The four-page open letter was signed by Patrick Baudouin himself to this effect and sent to President Francois Hollande shortly before the latter’s second visit to Algeria and posted on the “France Inter” website on Monday.

Lawyer Baudouin asked President Hollande to apply “pressure on the Algerian Government (..) to enable French judges and experts who conducted a post-mortem analysis of samples obtained from the remains of the monks’ skulls arguing that the Algerian judge involved in the investigation refused giving them the samples, retrieved in the central Médéa region in mid-October 2014, while pointing to the vulnerability of these samples which could be damaged if the required expertise analysis needed to uncover the truth isn’t accelerated”, as he claimed.

As a recall, French judge Trévidic and two other French judicial officials stayed in Algeria for one week in October 2014 and took part together with Algerian forensic experts in the exhumation and forensic examination of the monks’ heads, which are buried at their monastery in Tibhirine, 80km south of the capital Algiers.

The seven Monks including Christian de Cherge, Luc Dochier, Paul Favre Miville, Michel Fleury, Christophe Lebreton, Bruno Lemarchand and Célestin Ringeard were abducted in March 1996 and their severed heads were found several weeks later. The rest of their bodies is still missing.

The (GIA) terrorist group, then claimed responsibility for the 1996 kidnapping of the seven Trappist Monks and sought a ransom. Later, GIA also said it had carried out the hideous assassinations.