None of the major French newspapers mention this and I should have checked them beforehand.

That said, I could point to Chirac’s government denying radioactive fallout over France after Chernobyl and practically everyone in France believed it for quite some time. So, this did not strike me as implausible. 😉

* *
The portion in question originated via an inquiry published (not suppressed) by the French government, based on 21 March 2016 testimony in which investigators were asked about rumors of torture or propaganda creation at the Bataclan. A translated version of the inquiry’s minutes revealed that investigators soundly debunked the claims on record:

Mr President Fenech For the information of the inquiry, Mr. PT, can you tell us how you learned that there had been acts of barbarism within the Bataclan: beheadings, evisceration, enucleations?

MTP After the assault, we were with colleagues at the passage Saint-Pierre Amelot when I saw tears streaming out of the eyes of an investigator who went to vomit. He told us what he had seen. I did not know this colleague, but he was so shocked that it went to see it myself, naturally.

Alain Marsaud. Acts of torture happened on the second floor?

MTP I think, as I entered at the ground floor I saw there no such thing had occurred, only people hit by bullets.

Minutes from the inquiry session of 30 March 2016 again addressed what were clearly marked as rumors, and the government inquisition again heard no forensic evidence that supported such claims:

Mr. President. Following the November attacks, he was referred to the commission of barbaric acts.

Frané§ois Molins. It’s a rumor. Forensic doctors were categorical: there was no act of barbarism, no use, including knives. According to a witness, the testicles of a victim were cut off, but no findings have corroborated it.

Even if the French government hadn’t made public their findings about torture and evisceration at the Bataclan prior to the attacks in Nice, the post-Bastille Day attack rumor operated on the assumption such a coverup was even possible. By all accounts, 89 people died at the Bataclan on 13 November 2015, while another 200 were wounded but survived, and many more escaped unscathed. Contemporaneous reports estimated that 1,000 people were in attendance at the Bataclan on 13 November 2015 with 700 of them were physically unharmed. Had the French government opted to cover up acts of torture and emasculation at the venue, there was nothing stopping the vast majority of surviving witnesses from sharing their stories. None did.

This police informer business sounds strange too, doesn’t it?

Did you see Hollande’s speech? He looked like a buffoon with his $10,000 coiffure who was totally out of his depth. Jihadis must have been laughing.

Regarding “not getting all the facts of the situation,” today’s reporting about the French government’s cover-up of Bataclan victims having been brutally and barbarically tortured just makes this all even worse.

Very depressing.

It is beyond bizarre. Did no one think to ask, “Let me see your delivery papers?”

When I first visited France, “Papiers, svp” was standard op. Obviously, no more – even when the country is on high terrorist alert.

I could ask a million obvious questions, e.g., How many French truck drivers work on Bastille Day? Everybody knows getting anyone in France to work OT or on holidays is practically impossible. And yet nobody – especially the police – thought anything of this, even after nine hours?

Your observation is interesting. I have been in France twice on Bastille Day, once in Paris and once in La Rochelle; and the police and military presence was much greater than anything I have witnessed here or anywhere in Europe. Someone took their eye off the ball if the ‘icecream’ truck was park on a major boulevard in a city the size of Nice.

“Life” did not drive him into a corner. Criminals invariably lack a work ethic and repeatedly make bad choices. They always blame others for their circumstances and by definition, subscribe to the notion that might makes right.

It seems to me that this was an epic, epic fail on the part of the police. So many clues and he was there for 9 hours and nobody noticed anything that should’ve been obvious to a person with a functioning brain and some experience in the world.

(Once upon a time, kids used to play with little matchbox toys and were able to identify all the different kinds of vehicles in the world. Babysitting once, a little 3 or 4 year old charge of mine pulled out all his matchbox trucks and identified them one by one. I was truly amazed at the subtle differences between some of the vehicles!)