One wonders how the State functioned between 2007 and 2012. The senior intelligence officials of the Ministry of the Interior, those of the diplomatic corps who wrote notes that remained in the drawers, sounded alarm bells resounding in a vacuum: members of the French government must not meet, during their trips to Libya, the brother-in-law of Colonel Gaddafi. And for good reason: Abdallah Senoussi, then a senior official in the Libyan secret services, was convicted in absentia by the Paris Special Assize Court for his role in the 1989 attack on the UTA DC10, which left 170 dead, including 54 French.
But, despite official warnings, both the chief of staff of the Minister of the Interior, Claude Guéant, and the Minister Delegate for the Interior, Brice Hortefeux, one of Sarkozy's close friends, met the devil. Hortefeux today, Guéant yesterday, are struggling to justify themselves before the court which is judging the supposed financing of Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 campaign by the Gaddafi regime, suspected of having established a “corruption pact” with Tripoli: the lifting of the international arrest warrant targeting Senoussi, described as a subject «d’obsession» for Gaddafi, would be one of the counterparts of this
