Nantes cathedral was burnt down on July 18, 2020 – Mathieu Pattier / SIPA
Every week after the fireplace within the cathedral of Nantes, the volunteer of the diocese confessed and was remanded in custody in a single day from Saturday to Sunday for “destruction and damage by fire”. He was taken into police custody on July 18 a number of hours after the fireplace and the opening of the investigation, then launched the next night.
The investigators needed to query him as a result of after the fireplace no hint of break-in had been discovered on the accesses to the constructing during which three beginning factors of fireside had been noticed. The “man” admitted, in the course of the examination of the primary look earlier than the analyzing Justice of the Peace, having lit the three fires within the cathedral: on the massive organ, the small organ and in {an electrical} panel “, specified the Lawyer of the Republic of Nantes Pierre Sennès. What do we all know concerning the suspect?
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“Eaten with remorse”
This 39-year-old man, indicted, is a “Rwandan, who came to take refuge in France a few years ago”, defined final week the rector of Nantes cathedral, Father Hubert Champenois. He was chargeable for closing the cathedral the day earlier than the fireplace. In keeping with the rector, who had indicated to have “confidence in himself as in all collaborators”, the volunteer was “serving as an altar”. The rector had identified him “for four or five years”.
In keeping with info from BFMTV, the person, in France since 2012, was topic to an obligation to go away French territory for the reason that finish of 2019. His residence allow was due to this fact not legitimate. He was not identified to the police.
Throughout the framework of this investigation, “more than thirty people” had been heard and twenty investigators of the judicial police had been mobilized, with particularly the reinforcement of the central laboratory of the prefecture of police of Paris, so as to decide the trigger. of the fireplace, in response to the prosecutor.
The volunteer faces ten years imprisonment
“My client cooperated,” the lawyer for the accused, Me Quentin Chabert, advised the each day Presse-Océan. “He bitterly regrets the facts and talking about it was a liberation for him. My client is today consumed with remorse and overwhelmed by the magnitude of the events, ”he says.
The volunteer incurs for this offense “a ten-year prison sentence and a fine of 150,000 euros,” stated Pierre Sennés in an e mail despatched in a single day.