http://www.neurope.eu/view_news.php?id=80648
A French journalist has been arrested in Paris on charges of publishing state secrets related to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the website of the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur reported on December 7.
Guillaume Dasquie, a reporter for the daily Le Monde, risks a sentence of five years in prison if he is tried and convicted on the charges of possessing and making public information or files vital to the French national defence.
Dasquie is charged with publishing, in the April 17, 2007, issue of Le Monde, parts of classified documents of the French intelligence service DGSE related to terrorism, and particularly to the September 11 attacks. According to Dasquie’s article and the documents published by Le Monde on April 17, the French intelligence service alerted its US counterparts in January 2001, or eight months before the attacks on New York and Washington, that the al-Qaeda terrorist network was planning to hijack US commercial aircraft. Le Monde also said at the time that it had in its possession 328 pages of DGSE documents marked “confidential,” consisting of notes, reports, analyses, maps, graphics and satellite photographs.
The daily described the documents as “nothing less than most of the reports drawn up by the DGSE between July 2000 and October 2001.” Dasquie was arrested on December 6 and placed under investigation, a stage preliminary to being charged with a crime. The media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders said that the manner of the arrest, which included a lengthy search of Dasquie’s home, was “abusive (and) unprecedented in France.”
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