Hitting Home

A grieving brother goes mid

The cream-colored Alfa-Romeo careered toward the assembled dignitaries as a security man, in a half-crouch, squeezed off shots from his .357 magnum. There were screams. Onlookers scattered. The car slued into a line of coffins, knocking one over, and finally rolled to a halt, after coming within ten feet of French Defense Minister Charles Hernu. The incident last week climaxed an otherwise solemn military funeral at the Toulouse-Francazal airbase for the nine French paratroopers killed in Chad. The grieving brother of one of the dead soldiers had tried to run down the Minister.

Hernu, who had just decorated each of the tricolor-draped caskets of the 17th Paratroop Regiment, was startled, but escaped injury; his assailant, a Toulouse nightclub bouncer named Lionel Rehal, 26, was wounded in the thigh by one of the shots fired at him. While officials considered what, if any, charges to lodge against Rehal, members of his family attributed his act to anguish over the death of his brother Laurent, 19. But they also complained, as did relatives of the other dead paratroopers, that the government had been less than forthcoming in explaining the casualties. Hernu originally announced that the men had died in a "tragic accident" while removing abandoned rebel vehicles. Government spokesmen later said that the soldiers were reconnoitering along a road that "might have been mined." Finally, a day after the funeral, Hernu told the French Parliament that the deaths had occurred when one of the soldiers "imprudently or perhaps accidentally" mishandled a 90-mm shell.