Doctors cast doubt on 1979 suicide of French politician

A PANEL of doctors appointed by a judge as part of an ongoing investigation into the 1979 death of Robert Boulin, a prominent French cabinet minister, has cast doubt on the official verdict of suicide.

Boulin’s family have fought a decades-long legal battle, alleging that the then employment minister was the victim of a political assassination. He had been tipped as a future prime minister.

The findings of four doctors, who examined evidence from an autopsy at the time and a second one four years later, will revive this long-running political scandal. Many French people believe the minister may have been killed to prevent him from exposing high-level corruption.

The current investigation was launched in 2015 at the insistence of Boulin’s family. The doctors’ conclusions, revealed by newspaper, challenge the official version that he drowned after taking barbiturates. The ingestion of the drug was cited as the reason why the minister supposedly drowned in less than 2ft of water in a pond in Rambouillet forest, near Paris.

But the doctors said no evidence was ever produced that he had taken “large quantities of barbiturates” as stated in an official report. Only valium was found in his blood, but the amount would not have been sufficient to cause him to lose consciousness and drown.

The lack of a post-mortem examination of Boulin’s lungs, which mysteriously went missing, made it impossible to confirm the cause of death as drowning, the doctors said. They acknowledged that it was a possible hypothesis, but said the evidence was “insufficient [to reach] a formal conclusion”.

Blunt force trauma found on Boulin’s face during the second autopsy could not be attributed to handling of the body during its retrieval from the pond, which was the official explanation, the doctors said.