The National Rally candidate in Mayenne, Annie Bell, who qualified for the second round of the legislative elections, was convicted in 1995 for having held captive for three hours and at gunpoint the secretary general of a town hall in the department, along with her husband.
Annie Bell, a septuagenarian who is running for the National Rally (RN) in Mayenne, has qualified for the second round of the legislative elections. The latter had been sentenced to prison in 1995 for an armed hostage-taking in a town hall in the department, the local press revealed on Tuesday, July 2.
The newspaper Ouest-France, whose press cutting reporting the hostage-taking was circulating on social networks on Tuesday, went to rummage through its archives to unearth this surprising affair, also covered at the time by our colleagues at AFP.
On January 5, 1995, Annie Bell and her husband held the secretary general of the Ernée (Mayenne) town hall hostage for three hours at gunpoint. The woman, who at the time bore her husband’s name, Jaccoud, locked herself in the secretary general’s office “after a scuffle.”
A shot, which did not cause any casualties, had even been fired by this woman, the police told AFP.
Annie Bell’s husband, a leatherworker with “very serious financial problems”, was also present. It took the intervention of the head of the Mayenne gendarmes to obtain the hostage’s release, after three hours of discussions.
Sentenced to ten months in prison with a 26-month suspended sentence
According to Ouest-France and the Courrier de la Mayenne, the couple had been charged with “wielding kidnapping” and placed in pretrial detention. Annie Bell had been tried in June 1995 and sentenced to ten months in prison with a 26-month suspended sentence, the newspaper said, which had “found no trace of a possible appeal” in its archives.
The RN candidate, aged 76, told Ouest-France that she did not wish to comment on the matter “before the end of the elections” while her party’s departmental delegate, Jean-Michel Cadenas, responded: “There is no criminal record, so no case.” When contacted by AFP, Jean-Michel Cadenas had not responded on Tuesday evening.
“I am appalled. I don’t see how a woman like her could represent the people of Mayenne in the National Assembly, let alone France,” reacted Yannick Favennec, the outgoing MP for the 3rd constituency of Mayenne who will face Annie Bell in a duel on Sunday under the Horizons label.
“I think that the RN has a strange human resource for finding its candidates, who are not up to the mandate they are seeking,” added Yannick Favennec, who obtained 48.68% of the votes in the first round, against 31.11% for his far-right opponent.
