PARIS, 16 July — The young man who tried to murder President Chirac was a neo-Nazi football hooligan who wanted to “provoke a government crisis” and to see his name in the newspapers, it emerged yesterday.
Maxime Brunerie, 25, succeeded only in firing one bullet from a cheap rifle, whose barrel was pushed in the air at the last moment by a bystander from Alsace. He did, however, achieve the world-wide notoriety that he craved.
Although French police were attempting yesterday to trace another neo-Nazi said to be Brunerie’s “best friend”, their working assumption remains that he was a psychologically disturbed young man who acted alone.
The British government’s electronic eavesdropping agency at GCHQ at Cheltenham has located a message placed by Brunerie on an English-language neo-Nazi website on Saturday in which he urged fellow neo-Nazis to watch the news the following day.
Brunerie had belonged to a number of ultra-right wing groups, which are virulently anti-Semitic and anti-American, including most recently a white supremacist and Holocaust-denying organization called Unite Radicale. He was also known to police as a racist, hooligan supporter of Paris Saint-German football club.
It also emerged yesterday that he had been a minor political candidate last year for the supposedly moderate right-wing nationalist movement run by Bruno Megret, the former deputy to the National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
On Sunday, Brunerie traveled from his family home in the southern Paris suburbs in a hired car and completed his journey to the Champs Elysees by Metro, with his low-powered, hunting rifle concealed in a guitar case.
Despite increased security measures, he took up a place among spectators for the traditional 14 July military parade at the corner of the Champs Elysees and the Etoile, surrounding the Arc de Triomphe. It is believed that, when he took aim, he was between 30 and 50 meters from Chirac, who was standing in an open-topped, command car.
His gun, bought eight days earlier, was a low-performance, .22 long rifle, available over the counter in French sports shops. In the hands of a experienced marksman — which Brunerie was not — the gun would have been capable of killing the president at that distance.
An Alsatian tourist, Jacques Weber, yesterday solved the mystery of what happened to the single shot fired by Brunerie. Weber said that he saw a man standing behind him pointing a rifle at the parade. “I grabbed the gun and pointed it towards the sky. I heard a bang and thought, ‘he’s fired’. “ Weber and three other bystanders wrestled Brunerie to the ground before the police arrived. President Chirac yesterday telephoned each of the four bystanders, one of who was a Canadian tourist of Algerian origin, to thank them for their “courage and calm”.
Brunerie was still being held yesterday in the Paris police psychological infirmary. In a garbled statement made to investigators just after his arrest on Sunday morning, he said that he had acted alone, because he wanted to provoke a government crisis and become famous. He also said that he had intended to kill himself aftter shooting Chirac.
Friends of Brunerie traced by the police said that he had sometimes spoken of assassinating the president but that they had alway assumed that he was joking. Investigators were yesterday tryiing to find a fellow neo-Nazi sympathizer, said to be Brunerie’s best friend, who was visited by the gunman on the day before the shooting.
Brunerie’s sister was being interviewed by police yesterday. His parents — with whom he lived — were in Spain on holiday at the time of the attack and were traveling back to France to answer police questions.
British intelligence has tipped off the French authorities that, during a sweep of the Internet after the murder attempt, they found that Brunerie had placed a message on an English-language, neo-Nazi website on Saturday.
In the message, Brunerie urged other neo-Nazis to watch for news from France on Sunday. (The Independent)
