After 30 years, Rainbow Warrior bomber apologizes
September 7, 2015
Speaking in an interview posted on the French investigative website "Mediapart," Jean-Luc Kister, 63, said after so many years that it was the right time to say sorry to the family of Portuguese photographer Fernando Pereira, who was killed in the 1985 explosion that sank Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior.
He also extended his apologies to Greenpeace and the people of New Zealand.
"Thirty years after the event, now that emotions have subsided and also with the distance I now have from my professional life, I thought it was the right time for me to express both my deepest regret and my apologies," he said.
On July 10, 1985 Kister, then a frogman working for France's DGSE spy agency, helped plant two limpet mines to the hull of the Rainbow Warrior while it was docked in Auckland. The aim was to blow a hole in the hull large enough to disable the vessel, so that it could not travel to the French nuclear testing site at Mururoa Atoll, 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) southeast of Tahiti.
"I have the blood of an innocent man on my conscience, and that weighs on me," Kister said. "We are not cold-blooded killers. My conscience led me to apologize and explain myself."
'Disproportionate measure'
He also described the order that had come from then French Defense Minister Charles Hernu as "disproportionate," as there were less drastic ways available to disable the ship.
"There was a willingness at a high level to say: this has to end once and for all, we need to take radical measures. We were told we had to sink it. Well, it's simple to sink a boat, you have to put a hole in it," he said.
Diplomatic row
When New Zealand investigators implicated France in the sinking of the Greenpeace ship, it sparked a major diplomatic row between the two allies. Two members of Kister's team were arrested and received 10-year sentences for manslaughter. They were subsequently released after France threatened to impose an economic embargo on New Zealand.
France has since made an official apology for the bombing and paid damages.
pfd/cmk (AFP, dpa)