The international police cooperation organization Interpol has lifted the red notice targeting the former director of the French Alliance of Irkutsk Yoann Barbereau, who fled Russia in 2017 to escape prison, we learned on Tuesday.
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The Interpol Files Control Commission considered during its 113th session that the legal proceedings against Yoann Barbereau in Russia had an “essentially political dimension” and decided that all data concerning Yoann Barbereau should be erased from the files of the Interpol. international organization, according to an Interpol document consulted by AFP. Contacted, the international organization did not comment.
Director of the French Alliance of Irkutsk, in Siberia, the Frenchman was arrested on February 11, 2015 by hooded men, in front of his Russian wife and their 5-year-old daughter. Imprisoned for 71 days then interned in a psychiatric hospital and finally placed under house arrest in Irkutsk, he fled and found refuge at the French embassy in Moscow. Prosecuted for a pedophilia case, which he says has been put together by the FSB, a "Kompromat" ("compromising file") with still mysterious origins, he was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in a severe regime camp by the Russian justice.
"The world is opening up again"
In November 2017, Yoann Barbereau had crossed the Russian border illegally to reach France, where he still lives. Until now, he could not leave France because of this red notice, an international search notice sent to Interpol members. “This means that the world is opening up again,” he told AFP. “If the Covid brings me to life, maybe I could travel one day,” he joked. “What I remember most is the motivation for the decision. It is a half-word recognition of the plot and the Kompromat, ” he added.
This 42-year-old native of Nantes, author of "In the jails of Siberia" (Éditions Stock, 2020), a story of his incredible adventures, had already won his case with the French justice which condemned the French state to pay him 300,000 euros last April 3 for "functional protection" , due to officials and public officials when they are victims of attacks. "It only remains for me to win my case before the European Court of Human Rights and have Russia condemned ," he told AFP. "Symbolically, that would be satisfying for me."