France's legendary terror cop

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2002/01/03/bruguiere/index.html

When Bruguiﾃｨre discovered in late January 1992 that officials in the government of Francois Mitterrand had secretly given the green light for a notorious terrorist leader to slip into Paris for medical treatment, he decided very quickly to take matters into his own hands. Old and frail and recovering from a stroke, George Habash, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- a radical splinter group of the PLO that virtually invented airplane hijackings -- had flown into Le Bourget Airport and, with a clandestine wink from the right people, quietly checked into a Red Cross hospital.

Under the French system, investigating magistrates are like supercharged district attorneys: Entirely independent and unconstrained by politics, they have extraordinary powers. In directing criminal investigations, they can file charges, issue search and arrest warrants and commandeer detectives, spies and diplomats. And, like an independent counsel in the U.S., they can even bring their own government to the verge of collapse.

Over the last few months French police under his direction have smashed several al-Qaida cells, including a group that had been planning to attack a cathedral in Strasbourg and another that had been plotting to blow up the American Embassy in Paris. In the last two decades he has had his fingers in the investigation of just about every terrorist incident involving French victims. He is the man who finally put Carlos the Jackal behind bars, and he was the first investigator to publicly link the Libyan government to acts of terrorism.

A few years ago he flew to Cambodia to dig for information on the kidnapping and murder by Khmer Rouge guerrillas of a couple of French tourists. He later traveled to central Africa after opening an investigation into the attack that brought down the Rwandan president's plane and ignited that country's 1994 genocide.

Bruguiﾃｨre likes to leave nothing up to chance -- trusting only himself and the colleagues in his unit to really get the work done. "The counter-terrorism division is so insular," says Jean-Pierre Dubois, a law professor and civil libertarian who three years ago helped write a report that offered a scathing indictment of Bruguiﾃｨre and his aggressive investigative tactics. "They believe they are the only ones who have any real sense of the threat posed by terrorism. Not the government or the parliament or us, only they understand."

He arrived in Paris in 1976 and, already thirsting for the media spotlight, began to specialize in sensational murders and organized crime. He took down a high-class call-girl ring whose client list included many high-ranking government officials. In 1981, in what would become the first of many extraterritorial excursions, Bruguiﾃｨre traveled to Japan to hunt down information about a Japanese student living in Paris who had dismembered and then cannibalized his Dutch girlfriend.

Alain Marsaud, then an influential magistrate in the Paris court, began lobbying the Mitterrand government to approve the formation of a special counter-terrorism unit of the French judiciary. The measures pushed through by Marsaud in 1986 called for all terrorism cases to be centralized in the hands of a small collection of Paris-based judges, who would be granted far greater investigative powers than their colleagues in the judiciary. Marsaud was appointed to head the new unit. He chose Bruguiﾃｨre as one of four investigating magistrates who would work alongside him on nothing but acts of terror.

When a French passenger jet, UTA Flight 772, went down over the Tenr Desert in Niger in 1989, in the worst terrorist incident in French history, Bruguiﾃｨre flew immediately to the scene.
[...]When he returned to Paris, a growing body of evidence in hand, Bruguiﾃｨre began to build a case against six Libyan agents, including Gadhafi's own brother-in-law. In 1999 those men, who have never been apprehended, were sentenced in absentia to life in prison. Bruguiﾃｨre's work on the UTA case helped set the stage for the imposition of United Nations sanctions against Libya and the eventual prosecution, in an international court, of another group of Libyan agents accused of destroying Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland in 1988.