The Belfort prosecutor on Wednesday June 16 requested eight months' suspended imprisonment against a police officer, prosecuted for having represented a large swastika with white tiles on the roof of his father's garage in Evette-Salbert ( Territory of Belfort).
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The Belfort Criminal Court will render its decision on July 7 at 8:30 a.m. The accused is being prosecuted for “
apologizing for crimes against humanity
”. The policeman formally disputes the facts with which he is accused. "
I am not a Nazi and I do not draw a swastika (...) I do not share these ideas, I fight them
", he said. before the judges. However, he could not explain how and by whom a two-by-two-meter swastika was drawn on this roof.
The Nazi symbol was reported to the gendarmerie by a neighbor on May 3. The occupant of the premises and his police son had just restored the roof themselves, two meters above the ground. For the Belfort prosecutor, Eric Plantier, the one who drew this swastika is "
necessarily the person who handled the tiles
". However, "
no one else has intervened on this roof,
" he emphasizes. It is "
unlikely that this was the result of chance
" and it is "
rigorously impossible
" that someone changed the position of the tiles during the four hours between the end of the repair of the roof and the discovery of the Nazi symbol by a neighbor, he believes. These are "
facts of great gravity
", while "
exemplarity is expected from a police officer,
”added the magistrate.
"
We do not invent a Nazi overnight, we got the wrong target in this case,
" replied the policeman's lawyer, Me Alain Dreyfus-Schmidt, who has listed dozens of testimonies collected in favor of his client and testified that he had never made racist or anti-Semitic remarks.
"
You cannot be absolutely certain that chance did not draw this swastika, as you cannot be absolutely certain that a third party did not intervene
", he argued, pleading the release "For
the benefit of the doubt
".
The police officer, regional leader of the UNSA union, and whose grandfather was a prisoner of war in Germany, considered it to be a malicious act. “
The intervention of a third party? It seems inconceivable
”, swept Me Robin, the lawyer of the association Maisons des friends, the only civil party in this case.
