Marine Le Pen blasted “blatant disinformation” after a French newspaper published, and then deleted, a claim that an alleged terrorist had literature from her party in his car at the time of Friday’s deadly attack.
Figures close to French sovereigntist leader Marine Le Pen of the National Rally (RN) party have demanded public apologies after left-wing actors ran with a mainstream media report claiming the alleged terror gunman of the Trappes attack on Friday had RN leaflets in his car.
The claim was only published by French newspaper Le Monde for a few hours before the national counter-terror prosecutor, who is leading the investigation into the attack, pointedly denied the paper’s report, but it had already been picked up by a series of politicians to criticise Le Pen, and even accuse her of having “blood on her hands”.
On Monday Le Monde reported: “A source close to the investigation stated that leaflets from the National Rally (RN) had been discovered in the individual’s car… [a second source] did not specify the nature of the documents, nor did they dispute that they were linked to the RN”.
Yet, as Le Figaro reported, at a mid-afternoon press conference, prosecutor Olivier Christen said: “I would like to clarify that no leaflets from any political party were found in his vehicle”. Le Monde later deleted the reference to the leaflets.
Regardless, the flood of condemnation of the National Rally and its leader Marine Le Pen for having allegedly inspired a right-wing terror attack rolled in. Many were quickly deleted after the prosecutor spoke, but others stood by their accusations.
Manon Aubry, a French Member of the European Parliament for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left LFI party, accused Le Pen of having “blood on her hands”, claiming “if she takes power, millions of fellow citizens will be in mortal danger”.
Socialist lawmaker Olivier Faure, on the other hand, deleted his accusations but doubled down in his clarification, insisting he’d been spiritually correct in the first place. Starting with “RN leaflets were found in the car of the Trappes terrorist. What a curious coincidence”, Faure went on to add that he’d “deleted my tweet relaying information from Le Monde that turned out to be inaccurate. What remains, however, are the statements from RN leaders which, through repeated stigmatization, lead weak minds to take action.”
Faure decried RN lawmakers for having historically described the Trappes Parisian suburb — where dozens of young men left France to join the Islamic State ten years ago — as a “miniature Islamic Republic” inside France and as a “European capital of jihad”. He accused the RN of putting targets on the backs of Muslims in France by identifying them as a “fifth column of terrorism”.
Marine Le Pen herself decided not to focus on the attacks from her political opponents, but on what she called Le Monde’s nakedly partisan decision to publish unverified information, accusing the paper of becoming a supporter of the “militant” effort to destroy her Presidential campaign. She said:
By disseminating unfounded, false, and tonight refuted information from the public prosecutor, the newspaper Le Monde has once again lent itself to a militant operation aimed at tarnishing the National Rally.
This blatant disinformation manoeuvre raises questions among the French about the essential issue of the objectivity and professional rigor that one is entitled to expect from the media during a presidential campaign.
Her deputy and likely political heir, Jordan Bardella, said the party was now awaiting a “mea culpa” and public apologies from Le Monde, which he sardonically called the “newspaper of record”, a cutting nod to the paper’s once-towering but now tarnished reputation for quality.
RN Lawmaker Manon Bouquin was more direct, saying left-wing actors who tried to smear her party with accusations should face pushback. As the prosecutor spoke, she said in a statement: “Le Monde is so eager to spew bile on us, it rushed headlong into fake news… they’ve just quietly changed the article on the sly.”
She later went on: “Don’t let up on the fake news from Le Monde about the RN leaflets and its relays”. Those who spread fake news about the RN, Bouquin said, are the same political activists who preach media censorship and who tell the public “that what you see and witness with your own eyes isn’t real. Rub their noses in their lies!”
Warning party supporters to be wary about what they read in the news in the run-up to the 2027 Presidential Election, Bouquin said: “That’s going to be the daily grind of news for the next 6 months. Don’t let yourselves get duped.”
The RN said in a statement Tuesday morning that they would sue Le Monde for defamation.
Meanwhile, the investigation into the Trappes attack continues. While the suspect, 39-year-old Kevin T, was briefly taken out of police custody and transferred to psychiatric care on the suggestion that he may be mentally ill and unfit for trial, this has now been reversed, and his police interrogation continues.
It is reported the doctor found the suspected terrorist did not show “any direct or indirect signs of hallucinatory or delusional activity”. Police say while he admits the facts of the attack, he denies there was any racial motivation.
As well as dismissing the media’s claim that the suspect had political literature in his car, the prosecutor’s press conference on Monday also made no reference to his having had political and religious books in his home, with earlier French media reports claiming police had found a Bible, Quran, and Adolf Hitler’s autobiography-manifesto Mein Kampf.
It is stated Kevin T. was unknown to the French intelligence services before Friday, and that while he had a criminal record, it involved common-law offences dating back 15 years. No link between the suspect and the far-right scene has been conclusively established.
Some public attention has focussed on allegations that Kevin T., far from being associated with the hard right, has alleged historic connections to the left and the pro-Palestine movement. French newspaper Le Figaro states it has investigated some historic photographs of pro-Palestine and left-wing events where a man who has been identified by some as suspect Kevin T with former left-wing lawmaker Olivier Pareja.
One-time green parliamentarian Pareja told the newspaper he remembered the man, whose name was Kevin, but couldn’t positively say it was the same Kevin who had been arrested on suspicion of a terror attack. Pareja said: “After reconstructing the events with several members of the association, we clearly remember a certain Kevin from that time… I can’t confirm that it’s the same Kevin… The one we knew was a loner, someone who sought contact. He wanted to meet people, but he wasn’t a very involved activist. He didn’t even donate a penny!”
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