Precautions, escort, constant surveillance. Threatened with death for their public positions, various personalities told BFMTV about their life under police protection, three days after the assassination attempt committed last Friday in the State of New York against the British-American writer Salman Rushdie.
This is the goal of a fatwa issued in 1989 by the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, a year after the publication of his novel. the satanic verses. A book considered “blasphemous” by the Shia clergy and that earned the novelist suspicion of apostasy.
When anxiety becomes a “way of life”
Also for the philosopher Daniel Salvatore Schiffer, the danger comes from Islamism. After reporting on three attacks against him in the last three decades, he testified on BFMTV on Sunday night: “I currently live in Brussels. On the threat assessment scale, I am at level 3 out of 5.”
A life on alert that has very concrete consequences on a day-to-day basis: “Once I brought Marek Halter to a conference in Brussels and there were 20 police officers around.” “I have a special number, and at the slightest alert I call and people come in combinations for my protection,” he said.
It represented a life emptied of all spontaneity and carefreeness, where worry becomes “a reflection, a way of life”. “It is rare that I announce my arrival in a public place, to avoid security problems and for discretion. I never stay long in the same place. In a restaurant, I never turn my back on the street, I always look straight ahead. from my. (…) You will never see me at an event where there are many people. You will never see me at a concert, in the theater, in the cinema, in dark places”, illustrated the intellectual.
“When I lived in Paris, I couldn’t take the metro anymore. I had a police car with flashing lights in front of my house,” says Daniel Salvatore Schiffer.
This anguish, naturally, contaminates the relatives of the threatened person. “It is a permanent stress. It is not only my person that I put in danger but also my loved ones. There it can cause problems, tensions,” argued the philosopher, signer of a forum in support of Salman Rushdie broadcast by many French. speaking media.
Neighborhood request to move
The journalist Mohamed Sifaoui has lived under police protection since 2003, due to his work on Islamism. He explained to TF1 on Sunday that these tensions had earned everyone around him over time.
“I have had to move for safety, I have petitions from the neighborhood asking me to move because it was ‘dangerous for them’. I said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s dangerous for me. First of all'”.
“I can’t be home and a friend calls me and says: ‘Here, we’ll meet in ten minutes at the bistro next door.’ There is always a device to put on, ”he lamented.
An accompanied birth
The existence of the essayist and former journalist from charliehebdo Zineb el Rhazoui has also been unsettled by Islamist fanaticism. For seven years, the police even accompanied him everywhere to ensure his safety. “My daily life resembles that of a confined person. All my outings must be organized. I am strictly prohibited from taking public transport. And then there is also the concern for privacy and freedom,” he said – he describes with TF1.
So much so that she had to give birth under a good escort. “I mean, my boy, he barely opened his eyes to the world, he was surrounded by armed men,” he said.
“It’s a shitty life”
The Italian journalist and author Roberto Saviano – for his part harassed by the vindictive desire of the Neapolitan Camorra – summed it all up in a concise duplex formula on BFMTV: “It’s a shitty life. It’s neither life nor death and always We’re under pressure.”
“We are always escorted, but we must take into account the reason why we live like this,” he continued. As the author of Gomorrah reminds us, it is a matter of principle: “I could go abroad, never return to Italy and never deal with matters that put me in danger… But no, I am stubborn and I continue like this”. hard.”
For Rushdie, the “return of the terrible years”
In the 1990s, when Salmane Rushdie traveled to France, eight RAID agents ensured his safety at all times.
“We covered 360 degrees of his personality. We called him the ‘diamond device.’ It’s true, he was hard to live with,” former RAID instructor Bruno Pomart explained on BFMTV.
Complications that, added to the passage of time, explain why precautions have been reduced in recent years. Wounded in the liver and eye by his attacker, the 75-year-old writer is nevertheless on the “road to recovery”. “His condition is improving. He is no longer on a ventilator,” his agent said on Sunday.
However, the dramatic episode that Salman Rushdie has just experienced will undoubtedly close this parenthesis of relative freedom, according to our adviser for international affairs, Anthony Bellanger: “It is the return of the terrible years for him and he will live under police protection again.” .
Source: BFM TV
