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THE PERSECUTION AND RESISTANCE OF Loic LE RIBAULT THE PERSECUTION AND RESISTANCE Loic RIBAULT Having spent time in prison awaiting trial, one of France's greatest forensic scientists escaped to Ireland where his re-absorption in the case of a French murderer with an Irish connection again shattered his peace. Part 2 of 2 hen Loic Le Ribault arrived in Ireland in October 1998 he felt safe, despite the fact that he had no passport and anonymous men, apparently secret service agents, had recently been stalking him. He entered Ireland after first slipping into England to stay with friends, who then drove him to Ireland via the Rosslare Ferry. Loic chose Ireland because, he said, it was "the only independent Celtic country in the world". After time in a hotel in County Mayo, he went to live in Ross, where the laboratory he set up began in June 1999 to manufacture GS, the organic silica which had proved to be useful in treating people with arthritis and other illnesses. Since his exile from France, realising that publicity was perhaps the only thing which would keep him alive, Loic had been constantly writing up his story as well as contacting newspapers and journalists about his predicament.' In 2003 he published his all-encompassing book in English, The Cost of A Discovery.’ In Ireland, Loic also continued his campaign to expose the frauds committed by the French Minister of the Interior when they copied his forensic equipment. Simmering beneath the surface, however, was one other reason why some powerful people wanted Loic put out of action. And almost inadvertently, Loic had settled in the one country besides France where this matter was of great importance. Throughout the 1980s, Le Ribault was the most important and renowned forensic scientist in France. He solved numerous murder cases for the gendarmerie and the magistracy. The equipment which he developed, based mainly on forensic sample collecting and their examination under an electron microscope, should have put the French police into the vanguard of crime detection. Instead they made Loic Le Ribault a hunted man. Powerful forces, however, did not want to give the individual- istic and anti-establishment loose cannon credit for his work or his techniques. His increasingly successful demonstrations of forensic skill frequently revealed that rou- tine police forensic work in France was corrupt and inept. Despite the reluctance of the police establishment and the Government to continue using Loic in crime detection, sympathetic admirers, independent judges, magistrates and some victims' lawyers still called on him throughout the late eighties. One of the cases he was given was that of the young Irish backpacker Trevor O'Keeffe who had been murdered and then buried in France in August 1987. This case was to be one of the last that Loic dealt with, before continuous obstruction and pressure of different kinds forced him to shut down his independent laboratories and turn his hand instead to his other great love, the development of organic silica. CONTROVERSY IN IRELAND Although Loic had promised himself a quiet life in Ireland, it was not long before he attracted attention. In the autumn of 1998 the Sunday Tribune carried a long story by Harry McGee about Loic's work on the case of a young Irish man, Trevor O'Keeffe murdered in France. After publication of the article the journalist put Loic in touch with Trevor's mother, Eroline. Ever since Loic had been asked to report on the mur- der ten years previously, he had tried unsuccessfully to contact Mrs O'Keeffe. When in November 1998 Loic was introduced to her, he was able to give her the full foren- sic report which he had prepared for his instructing judge in 1997 and which she had not been allowed to see. Slingshot Publications BM Box 8314 London WC1N 3XX England JUNE — JULY 2005 NEXUS +19 by Martin J. Walker © 2005 www.nexusmagazine.com