The French media has reacted with shock after raids by police and the judiciary on two titles in Paris.
An
examining judge, flanked by a dozen staff and special police officers,
marched into the offices of the weekly Le Point to seize files and
computers.
The offices of sports weekly L’Equipe were raided by another judge.
In
January 2004 three journalists, Jean-Michel Décugis, Christophe Labbé
and Olivia Recasens, published a story on a doping scandal involving
the cycling team Codifis during the 2003 Tour de France.
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The story drew heavily on tapes that were ordered by another judge who was in charge of the inquiry into the scandal.
It
appeared to implicate police officers from the drug squads in an
alleged attempt to cover up the story. The judges believed that the
journalists interfered with their inquiry.
Prior to the raid, the three journalists at Le Point refused to give any information on their sources.
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Their
boss, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, said: “We’ve done nothing illegal, to ask
us to name sources is impossible. When journalists betray their sources
they are not fit to be journalists anymore.”
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