NEW ZEALAND / AUSTRALIA: As TVNZ airs the footage of a 1985 trial of two French agents who bombed a Greenpeace ship after a long legal battle, activists still accuse France of state terrorism

Television New Zealand on Sunday (October 01) aired court footage showing two French agents pleading guilty over the bombing of a Greenpeace ship in 1985, after winning a landmark legal battle. Two French agents, Commander Alain Mafart and Captain Dominique Prieur were arrested after the incident and charged with murder .The entire proceedings were in fact simulcast by a closed circuit video system into the adjoining courtroom because of high media interest and a lack of space in the courtroom. The French spies, who admitted killing a Greenpeace photographer, have failed at the last hurdle to stop TVNZ broadcasting their courtroom confessions, according to TVNZ. After the courts released the tapes in August, viewers were shown Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart pleading guilty to the manslaughter of Fernando Pereira. But the former spies took their fight to the Supreme Court The court has dismissed their request to appeal the High Court decision and has ordered they pay $2,500 costs to TVNZ. In its judgement the Supreme Court says the pair pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1985 in circumstances hard to imagine ever being repeated in this country. TVNZ have broadcasted the footage on a special programme. Greenpeace Chief Executive Officer Steve Shallhorn in Sydney has also watched the footage. "It send a shiver up to my spine to see the guilty pleads of those two French agents who were a part of the team that placed two bombs on our ship killing one of our crewmembers" said Shallhorn. TVNZs lawyer William Akel who has carried out the legal battle welcomed the decision. "I cant really comment on that, they of course were the national respondents to the proceedings but I suspect the French government would be behind the fight" said Akel responding to a question if there was any French government involvement during the long lasting court case. Head of News and Current Affairs, Bill Ralston says it has been an incredibly long and dogged fight to bring these pictures to the public. Agents were sentenced by a New Zealand court to 10 years' jail for what the judge described as a terrorist act, but French pressure including trade sanctions resulted in a deal involving reduced terms. Mafart and Prieur spent about six months in a New Zealand prison before being transferred for three years to an island in French Polynesia, where Prieur's husband was made head of security. Both returned to France in less than two years, Mafart supposedly due to illness and Prieur because her father was said to be dying of cancer. The operation came to be seen as an ill-conceived and executed disaster for French intelligence and a blight on the record of then president Francois Mitterrand. Mitterrand initially denied any involvement in the bombing before caving in to media pressure and authorising an inquiry. New Zealand police have said members of a four-man squad suspected of actually planting the mines are still at large. "There are still four agents at large who are responsible for placing the bombs that sank our ship and killed our crewman, France should take action against those four people, but they probably will never and that's because what they did was ordered by the highest level of the French government that act was an act of state terrorism" said Greenpeace executive Shallhorn. Crippled by two mines planted in the dead of night, the ship was targeted in a bid to stop it launching a campaign against French nuclear testing in the Pacific, which had sparked large protests in Australia and New Zealand.

ITN Source | October 1, 2006

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