It’s May 18th, the date of my parole, but I’m still in the slammer and I’m going to be staying here.
Sentence judge Catherine Ardaillon, left-wing trade unionist, activist at the Evry tribunal and at Fléury-Mérogis prison, has decreed that all the same, for cases like mine, its lucky that there are prisons and therefore adjusting my sentence is out of the question.
Unlike my last sentence, I am not under the yoke of the anti-terrorist law, but in practice it is still applied to me.
This is why the application for permission to go to a job interview ( which can not be refused at the end of a sentence), which I handed over to my SPIP, Jean-Baptiste, miraculously transformed into a simple request for ‘permission to maintain family ties’, so that it could be rejected by JAP Catherine Ardaillon.
For several weeks now, I have been subjected to numerous searches, searches of my cell, searches of my body, etc. They found nothing until an informant (who must have been very close to me, to give such precise information) told them where I was hiding my SIM cards. So a few days ago they found 3 SIM cards hidden inside a packet of new rolling papers. They were hidden intersperesed between the papers at the bottom of the packaging. During the search, the guard reacted in a way that netrayed that they had an informant: just before the search, when I emptied my pockets before undressing, he immediately took my 2 packets of rolling papers aside, but he seemed disinterested by the rest. I knew I was done, and indeed, at the end of the search, he said to me: “And here, there is nothing?” Then he pulled out all the sheets one by one until the SIM cards appeared.
In the days that followed, some of the prisoners who I am close to have undergone similar searches.
Last night on May 17th, an ERIS intervention squad broke into my cell at around 8PM. For those unfamiliar with the ERIS, they are squads that receive the same training as the GIGN, GIPN and RAID, overtrained and equipped with various protections similar to those of the CRS – bulletprooof versts, plastic shields, hoods under their helmets so they cannot be recognized, reinforced gloves, shin guards, etc, etc. They are usually armed with batons and flashballs which they shoot at point black range, of course, since a cell is not bigger than 9m².
In short they shocked us and threw us into the corridor, glued to the wall with our hands on our heads and then handcuffed. Myself and my co-detainee were then dragged into seperate search rooms. For the rest, we know the story, thorough strip search, with the particularity this time that one of them forcibly lifted one of my legs to keep them apart as much as possible so that his colleague who was squatting could look at my anus better, with his Mag-lite so close to my ass that I could feel the heat produced by the bulb.
At the time it made me think of the Theo affair, but I found nothing better than to say to him with a sly air: “Well my pig, you are doing a good job!”. When I think about it, it was a little silly to say that, because even though I wanted to be ironic, to push the zeal until you sabotage the foundations, there is no doubt that this pig really took pleasure!
After the strip-tease, they threw us into the waiting room. They had blocked the windows with sheets of paper glued to the outside, but as one of them was slightly torn, I could see what was going on in the corridor.
There were a large number of people: matrons, ERIS, all the lieutenants, the director, plainclothes cops and the prosecutor.
They completely emptied the contents of the cell into boxes that were loaded into a truck to take them to the scanner. Then I saw them go into the cell with dogs. Later my cell neighbours told me that they even heard them dismantling parts of the cell with a screwdriver.
Meanwhile, my cell mate, who is far from being a good strategist, was trying to break everything, banging everywhere and playing hide and seek by crouching right under the windows when they lifted the paper to see what was going on. Well, of course, the director ordered the ERIS to forcibly remove him to solitary.
In these cases, I prefer to make myself as discreet as possible in order to observe and listen to everything that happens and is said, the people present, etc.
I was left alone in the waiting room until 1:30AM. The search took approximately 5.5 hours.
When they took me out of the waiting room, they conducted a rather strange search: this time they searched in my mouth! The Mag-lite so they could see and then “put your tongue to the left, top, right, bottom, spread your cheek with your finger,” etc. For a moment I wondered if they were going to take me to the scanner itself, these idiots!
Then I understood: they were looking for a SIM card. The first three they already had, they had to analyze them and see whether there was anything interesting to find.
A few hours later, the lieutenant confirmed my suspicions: during the search they found 2 phones, a charger and a SIM. The lieutenant told me that everything had been sent off to be analyzed to determine who it belongs to.
He asked me some questions and I said I did not know who it belongs to. He did not insist, something that did not surprise me, because I knew that the result of the analysis would be for my part negative.
The cell was like Chernobyl! A real rubbish dump! Something that if you did not see it with your own eyes you would not believe me! Well, so I cleaned and cleaned until 7AM, then I slept a little, then finished cleaning this afternoon before writing this letter.
In reality, they did not succeed in finding anything concrete, and yet they put the package in. But that did not prevent them from rejecting my parole.
I learned that today when I was able to call my girlfriend.
Perhaps the new Minister of Justice, the bastard of Bayrou, remembers the attack on the church in Pau, the town of which he is the mayor, made with a Molotov cocktail and claimed by the GADI (International Direct Action Group) in January 2014. An action and cell for which I claimed responsibility and participation following my arrest on charges of terrorism.
Since I have not given any news for a long time, I will quickly recollect the sabotage of the prison workshops that I was accused of. As for the judicial procedure, which was not very interesting, I will simply say that they could not determine who was responsible. What is interesting is that the economic damage caused from inside the prison was not negligible. In fact, many Post-it customers would have been impacted in Norway, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, Austria, France and England. It seems that the delivered merchandise was in some case not what had been ordered, and in the other cases was badly made and therefore unsellable.
It is possible that following the debates surrounding the collage of anti-election posters that were pasted up in the courtyard, some prisoners wish to pout into practice in the here and now the anarchist proposals that emerged from it.
I hope this letter is not too long or too boring to read.
I have tried to be as accurate as possible, because it is important for me that comrades on the outside have all the information.
I want to salute the Greek comrades and say that the Nemesis Project is an exciting proposal.
A wink of solidarity to Kara and Krèm!
Damien,
Fleury-Merogis prison, somewhere in the world.
PS: I still have not been able to make public the whole procedure for which I am imprisoned, because the French State have classified the file as internal security, which means I have to make a special request in order to have access to it. I mad the request but it was rejected.
(via Attaque, translated by Insurrection News)
