Arrests
On 21 February 1987, the main Action directe members, Jean-Marc Rouillan, Nathalie Ménigon, Joëlle Aubron, and Georges Cipriani, were arrested. They were later sentenced to life imprisonment. Régis Schleicher had already been arrested in 1984. Joëlle Aubron was released in June 2004 for health reasons and died of lung cancer on 1 March 2006. There is an ongoing campaign by some sections of the French far-left that the Action directe members still imprisoned, who consider themselves political prisoners, should be paroled. In December 2007, Rouillan was allowed a state of "semi-liberty", able to leave prison for extended periods. In September 2008, a Parisian court called for the revoking of this status after he declared in an interview with l’Express that "I remain convinced that armed struggle is necessary at certain moments of the revolutionary process."
Read more about this topic: Action Directe (armed Group)
Famous quotes containing the word arrests:
“I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)
“On our streets it is the sight of a totally unknown face or figure which arrests the attention, rather than, as in big cities, the strangeness of occasionally seeing someone you know.”
—For the State of Vermont, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)