Egypt has used intelligence supplied by the French military to target and “kill civilians” suspected of smuggling, a report on Sunday by investigative Web site Disclose said, based on leaked documents.
French opposition deputies immediately called for a parliamentary committee to be set up to investigate the affair, while French Minister of Armed Forces Florence Parly ordered her own investigation.
“Sirli,” the name of the mission between the two countries, was designed to provide intelligence on the jihadist threat along Egypt’s western border with Libya, Disclose said.
Photo: Reuters
“In principle, the mission... consisted of searching the Western Desert to find possible terrorist threats coming from Libya,” using a light aircraft designed for surveillance and reconnaissance, it said.
“But very quickly, the [French] members of the team understand that the intelligence supplied to the Egyptians are used to kill civilians suspected of contraband,” the Web site wrote.
French military staff regularly notified their superiors of the abuse of the information, it added.
Disclose based its report on hundreds of classified documents on the operation that were leaked to it.
According to those documents, the French military was implicated in at least 19 airstrikes against civilians from 2016 to 2018.
Operation Sirli began in February 2016 during the administration of then-French president Francois Hollande.
It continued despite the reservations expressed by the French military intelligence and the air force about the way Egypt was using the intelligence, Disclose said.
One such note was addressed to Parly on Jan. 22, 2019, before French President Emmanuel Macron’s official visit to Egypt.
The French military was nevertheless still deployed in the Egypt, Disclose reported.
Neither the French presidency nor any of the arms of the military responded to an approach from the journalists who carried out the investigation.
Within hours of the story’s publication, a statement from the French Ministry of Defense confirmed that the two countries had arrangements in the field of intelligence and counterterrorism.
However, for security reasons, they were not prepared to say any more on the matter.
The statement added that Parly had asked for an investigation to be launched into the information revealed by Disclose.
The left-wing opposition France Unbowed party issued a statement calling for a parliamentary inquiry into the allegations.
The party called for French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian, who served as defense minister during the Hollande presidency, to come before parliament to explain what was going on.
Although France has expressed a desire to refocus its arms exports on Europe, Egypt remains one of its main clients.
Its sales there increased considerably when Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi took power in 2014. Since then, Egypt has bought France’s Rafale fighter aircraft, a frigate, four corvettes and two Mistral helicopter-carriers.
In December last year, Macron awarded al-Sisi the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, the highest award that France has to offer, provoking outrage from activists who have criticized his human rights record.
The Burmese junta has said that detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is “in good health,” a day after her son said he has received little information about the 80-year-old’s condition and fears she could die without him knowing. In an interview in Tokyo earlier this week, Kim Aris said he had not heard from his mother in years and believes she is being held incommunicado in the capital, Naypyidaw. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was detained after a 2021 military coup that ousted her elected civilian government and sparked a civil war. She is serving a
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS