THIRD DEGREE SCANDAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1005, 23 June 1930, Page 11

THIRD DEGREE SCANDAL

PARIS POLICE BOMBSHELL SWEEPING CHANGES Sweeping changes in the Paris detective department and in the manner in which prisoners and suspects are to be examined have been ordered by the French Premier and Minister of the Interior, M. Tardi'eu, and the Minister of Justice, M. Raoul Peret, as a result of the notorious Almazian case. Almazian, a French tailor of Armenian extraction, was arrested in October last and charged with the murder of an accountant named Rigaudiu, whose body was found in a trunk at Lille railway station cloakroom. Almazian has throughout protested his innocence and has brought charges

of assault and illegal detention against the Paris detective force. He declares that he was kept a prisoner without a warrant for 70 hours and tortured in an attempt to extract from him a confession. The Public Prosecutor, M. Donat Guigue, has now ordered that all charges against Almazian are to oe dropped. A new head has meanwhile been appointed to the Paris detective force M. Xavier Guiehard—who was in charge of the activities against the notorious Bonnot gang of motor-bandits before the war. He will be called upon to stop the illegal “Third Degree” cross-examinations. The police laboratory, where scientific methods are employed to prove the guilt or innocence of a person from bloodstains and so on—is also to be reorganised. The indictment against Almazian, for instance, was largely built up on the reports that bloodstains in his shop were identifiable with the blood of the murdered man, and that hairs found in the shop were similar to hairs in the trunk. The counter-experts, three of France’s most famous professors, on the other hand, declared that the slight traces of human blood found were unidentifiable, and that .many of the socalled stains were not blood at all. In a like manner they destroyed the theory of the hairs. The development having completely shaken faith in the reliability of the police laboratory witnesses,’ it has been decided to form a body of entirely independent experts. In all cases of doubt they will be called upon immediately to conduct tests simultaneously with the police experts.