The investigation into the origin of the fire of Notre-Dame de Paris would have lead in the wing.
While the cathedral restoration project is progressing at a steady pace, the legal proceedings supposed to determine the causes of the disaster could be the subject of a dismissal order in the fall,
Le Canard enchaîné
learned this week .
For lack of elements, no one responsible for the fire could be identified with certainty and even less put in examination, suggests a source of the weekly.
“The file will be closed because it is impossible for us to know if it is the track of the cigarette butt or that of the electrical short-circuit which is the good one”
, declared a magistrate of the parquet floor quoted by
Le Canard
.
Adding:
“If there had been victims, the situation would be different”.
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Laocoön base
Joined by
Le Figaro
, the Paris prosecutor's office said that the judicial investigation was still in progress.
This would probably not be closed this fall, as indicated by
Le Canard enchaîné
, due to new intermediate and additional expert opinions just ordered in April 2022. These are added to the two remaining expert opinions among the five ordered by the magistrates at the day after the fire.
thorny investigation
The long-term investigation into the causes of the fire of April 15, 2019 is not beyond complexity.
Entrusted to three investigating judges, a judicial investigation was opened on June 26, 2020, following a preliminary investigation launched the day after the accident.
Despite repeated delays, particularly related to securing the site and the health crisis linked to the Covid-19 epidemic, more than a hundred witnesses were heard and the origin of the fire could be identified with precision thanks to the assistance of experts.
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Finding the precise causes of the disaster, on the other hand, proved to be much more difficult.
The criminal track ruled out, a handful of hypotheses on the accidental origin of the fire caught the attention of the investigators.
The track of a cigarette thrown by a worker - cigarette butts were found in a critical area where smoking was prohibited - and that of a short circuit linked to the installation in 2007 of electrified bells whose cables ran through the attic of the building.
Were there
"involuntary degradations"
or a
"manifestly deliberate violation of an obligation of prudence or security"
, as the judicial information seeks to characterize?
And if so, who was responsible?
The different hypotheses swing sometimes towards the personnel responsible, at the time of the fire, for the restoration of the framework, towards the bishopric, the chief architect of the cathedral or even the Ministry of Culture.
“We will probably never know the cause of the start of the fire”,
confided to AFP in 2020, a source familiar with the matter.
On the side of the prosecution, where we are still awaiting the conclusion of the various judicial expertise, the white smoke of the investigation is still pending.
