November 3, 1979: Meslin was shot dead at Porte de Clignancourt, a stone’s throw from our office

Mohamed Laghouati dashes off the beaten track, through the Porte de Clignancourt intersection in Paris. It is 3.15pm on Friday, November 2, 1979, and the courier has only one thought in mind: to catch the metro as quickly as possible, then the train at the Gare de l’Est. He must be back before nightfall at all costs. The 35-year-old, a news courier for Le Parisien, “does it”: twice a day, he packs rolls of film from photographers in the Oise department in his precious bag and delivers them to the The newspaper’s headquarters in Saint-Ouen, Seine-Saint-Denis.

There was no question of missing closing time, the presses would not wait for it to print. The readers of Compiègne did not know that it was thanks to him that they could find the newsstands filled with the newspaper’s illustrations and photographs in the early morning. In the late seventies, the newspaper’s films were still in black and white, and Mohammed’s work had not yet been swallowed up by digital transmission.

‘It backfired immediately’

Readers of Le Parisien found the rest in the next day’s paper, Saturday, November 3: “The result was immediately counterproductive. Meslin, who I knew almost immediately was him, remained nailed to his seat.Mohammed testified that it seemed to me that he was killed instantly. The girl next to him fell on all fours on the sidewalk. She was wounded and had been shot again. I saw a bag at the feet of the gangster. As I approached I recognized Mr. Broussard, the anti-gang leader. He asked me what are you doing there? I told him I was from Parisian Showing him my newspaper card, I then asked him this question: This is Meslin, isn’t it? He told me: You’ll see it tonight, go away. I did just that and immediately called the nearest café for the newspaper. »

Mohamed’s call triggered a tsunami a few hundred meters away behind the Saint-Ouen flea market. At 25 Avenue Michelet, the entire editorial staff of Le Parisien was getting into gear. Five photographers and almost as many journalists were immediately dispatched. The fast and precise lens of Dany Grandemanche, one of the rare female photojournalists, managed to capture a close-up of Public Enemy No. 1 sitting behind the steering wheel and wearing a seatbelt. Jacques Meisling’s head was tilted to one side, temple be damned. In the foreground, in the lower right corner, we can see a charger on the fugitive’s hip.

At night, on the newspaper luminous board where the negatives were checked, the photo was preserved, mounted in five columns on the front page, under the headline in bold letters: “The Killer’s End”. The caption: “Meslin fell into the police trap, he did not have time to use his weapon. »

Photographer shooting

“Dani took her picture and immediately left to take it to the newspaper. I arrived shortly after,” recalled Thierry Besnier, also a photographer Parisian. When the editor-in-chief called me – “Meslin has just been shot” – I was at home in Franconville, Val d’Oise. I jumped on my news motorcycle and nine minutes later I was there, where a police security cordon had been formed. One of our colleagues at the paper, Yves Bardin, had injured his foot during the evacuation and, in a panic, a car ran over him. The stage was inaccessible. Together with the ten photographers who had applied, we set up a thing. The security cordon must be broken at all costs. At the signal, I put my hand on the shoulder of a policeman, and the others behind me pushed me hard, creating a false crowd movement. We broke through the cordon and were able to enter the protection perimeter collectively, where we had a few minutes to work before being evicted. »

The photographer machine-guns: Meslin’s body is taken out of the car, Meslin is carried away on a stretcher, the star-shaped windshield of the BMW is riddled with bullets, the swarm of policemen around Chief Brossard… The photographer also sneaks into the scene. In the aerial plan, the structure is located on the floors of the neighboring buildings and surrounds the square. We can see onlookers being stopped by police, police and emergency vehicles, riots. All these images appear on the three inside pages of the newspaper, dedicated to the story of the event and the life of the mob. The titles of the multiple articles signed collectively by the four editors are eloquent: “At 3:15 pm, the end of the sad saga”, “Fregoli on the run”, “Meslin falls”, “VGE congratulates the police”.

By taunting the state, the Meslin case has become a political issue

The press deployment is in line with the event. By making a mockery of the state, the Meslin case has become a political issue. His last months on the run have made the Minister of the Interior, Christian Bonnet, nervous, and he has kept the President of the Republic, Giscard d’Estaing, directly informed of the progress of the manhunt. Two years before this fateful day, we read in a newspaper that the gangster said to the police in front of the Paris felony court: “The next time we meet face to face, whoever shoots first will be right”. »

The king of escapes – among them from the Compiègne court in 1973 and, above all, from the heavily guarded Paris sanitary district on May 8, 1978, a year after these prophetic statements – has fashioned his megalomaniacal gestures with a single stroke of brilliance. Here he offers champagne to the police who come to arrest him; there he uses a rare chameleon-like perfection of make-up, even as a provocative letter writer, signing his letters to the police “A good hunt”.

Meslin is first and foremost a murdererhostage-taker, ransom demander, bank robber. A cynical bandit who recklessly robs employee salary funds that are still delivered in envelopes. His first crimes in France and Switzerland lead to a criminal life exiled to Quebec and Venezuela before returning here, which will lead to his tragic fate.

Everyone thinks they see a disguised healthy fugitive on every street corner

Three weeks before the final act at Clignancourt, the Meslin psychosis is sweeping the country, everyone thinks they see the fugitive disguised as “healthy” on every street corner, the police pursuit seems to have failed, and Le Parisien has put all its energy into it. On September 12, he saw on the front page: “Why is Meslin still at large?” We can read comments like: “All the French police have been mobilized in vain for years, are we going to put a price on his head”?

For Mohamed Laghouati, the price paid was retrospective fear. On the night of November 2, he turned around and returned home. “He later realized that something might have gone wrong, that he might have been shot,” recalls his wife Elizabeth. “In our family, this story has left a deep impression. That morning, our daughter Karina woke up, terrified by a nightmare. She dreamed of a dead man behind the wheel of a car… just a few hours before the scene her father had experienced that afternoon! » Over time, Mohamed left the “circle” and became a rotundist, still working at Le Parisien. His wife Elizabeth succeeded him as courier for the “fold” in Oise.