Posted on 01/13/2003 11:45:41 PM PST by JohnHuang2
The airport baggage handler found to have an arsenal of weapons and Islamic literature in his car may have been telling the truth with his insistence that he was framed.
Police in France have arrested the former parents-in-law of Abderazak Besseghir on suspicions they tried to set him up by planting guns and explosives in his car.
As WorldNetDaily previously reported, police found an automatic pistol, a machine gun, five cakes of plastic explosives and two detonators inside Besseghir's vehicle Dec. 28, parked in a lot next to the Air France terminal at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
The trunk additionally contained a religious tract written in Arabic, a pro-Palestinian document, information about pilots' uniforms and an agenda with notes on flights from Paris to America.
De Gaulle airport, one of Europe's busiest, employing 55,000 and handling 100,000 passengers per day, is the same one where terrorist Richard Reid of Britain boarded a Miami-bound plane last year with explosives stashed in the sole of his shoe.
The bomb in the Peugeot was reportedly ready to use, prompting fears that a terrorist attack was imminent.
Besseghir, a 27-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent, had claimed from the outset he was being framed by his own in-laws – Ahmed and Fatia Bechiri – who blamed him in connection with his wife Louisa's death in an apartment fire last July. She had leaped from a window during the blaze, and police later ruled her death a suicide.
Though authorities were initially reluctant to believe the frame-up story, they began to take his claim seriously after finding no ties to any extremist groups and none of his fingerprints on the weapons.
Last week, a former Foreign Legion soldier – 39-year-old Marcel LeHir – confessed to planting the items in the car. LeHir was the person who had originally tipped off police, claiming to have seen Besseghir acting suspiciously with a gun in the parking lot.
Besseghir was released Friday after spending ten days in prison.
"Despite all that I have endured in the past 15 days," he told the BBC, "I still trust that justice will be done."
Authorities are now questioning the Bechiri family on suspicion of slanderous denunciation and denunciation of a non-existent crime. They're also reportedly seeking Louisa's uncle, Djilali Diffalah, who has possibly fled to Algeria.
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