Group known as Tarnac Nine cleared of sabotage plot after 10-year investigation and two-week trial

French judges have acquitted eight people accused of being part of an anarchist group that attempted to sabotage part of France’s high-speed rail network a decade ago, ruling that the group itself had been a “fiction”.

Defence lawyers had accused the government and authorities under the former rightwing president Nicolas Sarkozy of wrongly claiming there was a hotbed of leftwing anarchist terrorists in a sleepy village in central France and manipulating the case in order to look tough.

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The notorious case, known as the Tarnac affair, began in November 2008 when more than a hundred French police officers swooped on the tiny rural village of Tarnac, arresting anti-capitalists who were living on a communal farm and running a village shop. In a vast media operation, the then rightwing government and French authorities alleged that the so-called Tarnac Nine were a cell of dangerous subversives intent on anarchist armed insurrection to overthrow the state.

At the time, villagers and the accused denied the charges, rights groups said the case was a misuse of anti-terrorism laws and lawyers said the case was deliberately being manipulated to make the government look tough against a supposed “enemy within”.

After 10 years of investigation — in which terrorist charges were dropped — and a three week trial, the two main accused – Julien Coupat, a business and sociology graduate, and his archeologist girlfriend, Yildune Lévy – were cleared of sabotage or belonging to any group.

“The hearing has allowed it to be demonstrated that the Tarnac group was a fiction,” the leading judge said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A police officer arrests a person on 11 November 2008 in the French village of Tarnac. Photograph: Thierry Zoccolan/AFP/Getty Images

Coupat and Lévy were found guilty of refusing to consent to a biological DNA test, but weren’t given a sentence. Of eight defendants — five men and three women, aged between 31 and 43 — the rest were also cleared of belonging to a subversive group. But one was convicted of handling stolen goods and attempting to falsify administrative documents.

“This is a humiliation for the anti-terrorism services of the time, for the magistrate who instructed the case, as well as for the anti-terrorist prosecutor,” said the lawyer Jérémie Assous, who defended several of those acquitted.

It emerged during the investigation that a former British police spy had infiltrated the group and made claims against them. French authorities did not pursue charges on those elements and Coupat had described the spy as “insignificant”.</s>"If there is one lesson to learn from this case, it is that the political exploitation of the legal system must end," lawyer Marie Dosé commented the day after client was declared not guilty in a case that started 10 years ago with 150 masked police officers raiding a libertarian commune in rural France.

The interior minister at the time, Michèle Alliot-Marie, claimed that an "ultraleft, anarcho-autonomous movement linked to sabotage" had been broken up and public prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin described the farmhouse's residents as "an invisible cell ... whose aim was armed struggle".

But on Thursday presiding magistrate Corinne Goetzmann declared the "Tarnac group, named after the village where they lived, a "fiction" and slammed police for "ruses and stratagems" in their attempts to obtain guilty verdicts against the eight accused.

In 2017 a court had already ordered the accusation of terrorism to be dropped.

This week Goetzman cleared the alleged ringleaders, Dosé's client Yildune Lévy and her former partner Julien Coupat, of accusations that they had sabotaged a railway line near Paris, only finding them guilty of refusing to give DNA samples and refusing to punish them even for that.

Five other accused, Elsa Hauck, Bertrand Deveaud, Manon Glibert, Benjamin Rosoux and Mathieu Burnel, were cleared of all charges, while a sixth, Christophe Becker, was given a four-month suspended sentence for receiving stolen documents and trying to falsify administrative documents and a 500-euro suspended fine for refusing to give a DNA sample.

Only Lévy and Deveaud were present in court for the verdict.

"We are white, young, of middle-class origin, with cultural capital," Lévy commented. "People with different first names, the Mamadoue, the Fatimas, how can they overcome what we have overcome?"
French judges clear the Tarnac Nine, accused of performing an anarchist terror sabotage in a controversial trial, of wrongdoing and describe the existence of a terror group as a "fiction". Defence lawyers had accused ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy's government of misusing counterterror law.