Aziz Zemouri counterattacks.
The journalist from Le Point, author of the article which implicated the couple of LFI deputies Raquel Garrido and Alexis Corbière before being withdrawn, filed a complaint on Tuesday for "breach of trust" against the former deputy Jean-Christophe Lagarde and a former policeman.
The complaint, which AFP and Le Parisien were able to read, was filed against the president of the UDI and a former territorial intelligence policeman and member of the Vigi police union, Anouar Bouhadjela, known as Noam Anouar, whom Aziz Zemouri presents as the origin of the false accusations against the two chosen ones.
Last Wednesday, an article by Aziz Zemouri published on the Point website accused the couple of LFI deputies of having exploited an undocumented cleaning lady, which they immediately firmly denied: "everything is false", they had protested.
Very rare fact, the article had been withdrawn the next day and the director of Point Etienne Gernelle had recognized “errors and breaches of caution”, in a message on Twitter and on the site of the weekly.
“I understood that I had been fooled”
At the same time, Le Point opened an internal investigation, the journalist was laid off and summoned to an interview prior to a possible dismissal.
Thursday, Aziz Zemouri said he was "convinced of the veracity of the facts".
He explains in particular in his complaint that he checked with an anonymous source "the identity", the nationality and "especially the existence" of the supposed cleaning lady, who would have sent him a photo of the home of the Garrido/Corbière couple, as well as a photo of their daughter to "convince" him that she was indeed their employee.
Read alsoThe Insoumis Raquel Garrido and Alexis Corbière, a rebellious couple in the Assembly
But since then, he says he is convinced of having been "manipulated", as he said during a telephone conversation Monday with Noam Anouar.
“These photos were in fact freely available on the Internet”, testifies Aziz Zemouri in his complaint.
After publication, a second police source will tell him that the woman in question was ultimately of “French nationality”.
“I then realized that the information I had been given was false and that I had been fooled,” admits the journalist.
In his complaint, he assures that the ex-policeman, "who would be seconded to the town hall of Drancy", whose mayor is the wife of Jean-Christophe Lagarde, contacted him at the end of May to put him in contact with a woman claiming to be the housekeeper, undeclared and without papers, of the couple of LFI deputies.
The journalist affirms that his informant called him “around the second round of the legislative elections” to ask him “if the article was ready to appear before the second round”.
"They are trying to make me the ideal culprit", denounces Anouar
Aziz Zemouri replied that the article was "blocked at the level of the newspaper's management" and specified that he had not yet written anything at that time.
“It was just an argument for him to drop the case because at that time I had not written any article on this subject at all”, he indicates in his minutes.
And to add that it was not his intention to publish such an article during the legislative elections, because he considered then that this journalistic information “did not have to influence the debate”.
Raquel Garrido, 48, was elected deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis against UDI president Jean-Christophe Lagarde in the second round of legislative elections on June 19.
In his complaint, the journalist from Le Point implicates the outgoing deputy, arguing that when the controversy broke out, the latter had posted on Twitter "comments" that the journalist had "only made to" the former police officer on the alleged blocking of the article.
Since then, Jean-Christophe Lagarde, who could not be reached at the writing of these lines, has deleted his publication.
In a video posted on his Facebook page, Noam Anouar categorically denied the accusations of the journalist from Le Point and being "the author of the plot" targeting the two elected officials.
“They are trying to make me the ideal culprit in the Corbière-Garrido affair,” he regretted.
