Alleged Macron attack gang's trial starts

The trial of alleged far-right activists accused of plotting to assassinate France's President Emmanuel Macron, and commit a series of other attacks, began in Paris on Tuesday.

The plot, deemed to be part of an attempted coup, involved a plan for an attack on the president during a public appearance in 2018, prosecutors said. Thirteen members of the group, named Les Barjols, conspired to spark an uprising against the government, prosecutors said.

Evidence gathered from telephone conversations, online, and from meetings shows the suspects planned to kill migrants and attack mosques, according to the prosecution.

As none of the plots ever evolved into actual attacks, prosecutors downgraded some of the original charges over the duration of the four-year probe, reported the Agence Franc-Presse news agency.

The allegation remaining against the 11 men and two women, aged between 26 and 66, is a charge of conspiring to commit a terrorist act, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

However, according to the defense, the group's threats were "just talk "and there was no specific or impending threat to Macron.

Lucile Collot, a defense lawyer, was quoted by AFP as saying the prosecution's case was built "on the fiction that a violent act was going to happen". Prosecutors began investigating in 2018, after France's interior security services received a tip-off suggesting a far-right militant based in the French Alps region was planning to attack Macron during a World War I peace treaty centenary commemoration in Verdun in northeast France, in November of that year, The Guardian newspaper reported.

The prosecution said that on Nov 6, 2018, police arrested Jean-Pierre Bouyer, 62 at the time, and three others suspected of far-right connections in the Moselle region of eastern France. Police say that during raids on properties including Bouyer's, they discovered firearms, and instructions on how to make explosives.

Bouyer told police during questioning that it was all "just angry talk".

"He admits there were discussions but they never went any further," Bouyer's lawyer, Olivia Ronen, told AFP. She added that any hostile remarks toward Macron had not been placed "in the context of the time", referring to the backdrop of social anger in France over rising fuel prices, which developed into the yellow vest protest movement.

"What was presented to us as a planned attack on the president of the republic is in fact the beginnings of the yellow vests," Ronen added.

The group's presumed leader, Denis Collinet, a former activist for Front National, was arrested in 2020. Investigators said that it was "an established fact" that the group's plans "were entirely aimed at seriously disrupting the public order by intimidation and terror". Prosecutors will argue that the plans were in place long before the yellow vests emerged, noted AFP. The trial runs until Feb 3.