ISLAMABAD – French investigators do not believe the 2002 bombing of a bustransporting French engineers in Karachi was revenge for the non-payment ofarms deal bribes, intelligence documents seen by *AFP* on Tuesday show.
The theory of a revenge attack, carried out after former president JacquesChirac cancelled the payment of bribes on arms deals signed with Pakistanand Saudi Arabia in 1994, has circulated for years.
Claims that some of the money paid in bribes was channelled back to Franceto help fund the 1995 presidential campaign of Chirac’s conservative rival,ex-prime minister Edouard Balladur, appeared to bolster that theory.
But in a note sent to magistrates investigating the kickbacks, for whichsix people went on trial on Monday in Paris, France’s counter-terrorismagency DGSI said it believed the initial theory of an militant attackremained the most likely scenario.
In support of the hypothesis, the intelligence note cited the timing of theattack — shortly after the September 2001 attacks in the US when France wasengaged in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
It also noted “more generally the threats against Western interests at thetime and in this region” in laying out the case for an attack by Al Qaedaor another terror group.
Yet 17 years after the bombing, the investigation — France always launchesits own probe into attacks on foreign soil in which French citizens arevictims — had yet to produce “any new element… on the perpetrators ofthis terrorist act”, the DGSI conceded.
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The theory of a dodgy arms deal gone wrong has kept the Karachi attack inFrench headlines for nearly two decades.
On Monday, three former French government aides, two Lebanese middlemen andthe former head of the international division of French defence contractorDCN (now called the Naval Group) went on trial over the alleged kickbacks,believed to have amounted to 13 million euros.
Balladur, 90, and his former defence minister Francois Leotard, 77, havealso been charged in the case.
They will be tried by the Court of Justice of the Republic, a tribunal thathears cases of alleged misconduct by government ministers.
The bombing in Karachi in 2002 killed 11 French engineers working for theFrench state company that built the submarines and at least threePakistanis. -APP/AFP
