As France mourns the Nice Bastille Day attack that killed more than 80 people on Friday, fresh claims have accused the French government of suppressing information of the alleged torture of victims killed in the Bataclan massacre, which was part of the terrorist attacks in Paris in November last year, in which a total of 130 people had been killed.
A French government committee that heard testimony in regard to the Bataclan massacre that killed 89 people, suggested that the gruesome torture which victims told the police about was filmed for propaganda of the Islamic State group, known in the Middle East as Daesh, and included decapitation, disembowelment, gouging out of eyes and castration.
Claims alleging torture also suggested women were stabbed in the genitals and in some cases the testicles of victims were shoved into their mouths. Investigators said due to the brutality inflicted on the victims, the medics did not release the bodies of torture victims to the families, according to French nationalist Boris Le Lay's website HeatStreet, which cited recent publicly released documents relating to the hearing.
The report continued to suggest policemen on the scene of the attacks last November vomited on seeing victims with their eyes gouged out.
The website claims the motive behind suppressing information from the public was "to protect the image of Islam and Muslim masses, both in France and in Europe and beyond."
The most dreaded portion of the report, however, includes a letter received by the President of the Committee, Georges Fenech, from the father of one of the victims:
On the causes of the death of my son A., at the forensic institute in Paris, I was told, and what a shock it was for me at that moment, they had cut off his testicles, had put them in his mouth, and he was disemboweled. When I saw him behind glass, lying on a table, a white shroud covering it up to the neck, a psychologist was with me. He said: This is "the only presentable part, your son's left profile." I found that he had no right eye. I made the remark; I was informed that they had punctured his eye and sliced down the right side of his face, where there was a very large hematoma that we could all see.
However in the released documents, François Molins, the public prosecutor for Paris, denied claims that any of the victims were tortured in such a manner, asserting that no bladed weapons were found at the scene, and the alleged disfigurement was possibly due to gunfire and explosions.
"Some of the bodies found at the Bataclan were extremely mutilated by the explosions and weapons, to the point that it was sometimes difficult to reconstruct the dismembered bodies. In other words, injuries described… may also have been caused by automatic weapons, by explosions or projections of nails and bolts that have resulted," a prosecutor argued.
"Would those have put a man's balls in in his own mouth?" asked one committee member.
"I do not have that information," the prosecutor responded.
