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[Jackpot]

So this became its own thing. There's been a whole bunch of back-covering over alleged lax security at the Nice event. First there was this:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...t-to-delete-truck-attack-surveillance-footage

Nice officials reject request to delete truck attack surveillance footage

Anti-terror agency asks authorities to destroy images as ministers face growing criticism over security measures on 14 July

Authorities in Nice have refused a request from French anti-terror police to delete surveillance camera images of last week’s deadly truck attack, amid growing questions over the scale of the police presence at the time.

The city received a letter this week from the SDAT anti-terrorism agency asking for images of the 14 July attack to be destroyed, an official at Nice city hall said on Friday.

The city is filing a legal complaint instead, arguing that the images could constitute evidence in the case, said the official, who is not authorised to be publicly named.

The letter did not provide a reason for the request, the city official said, but Le Figaro newspaper said national police were concerned the images would leak out and be used for jihadi propaganda.

The request came as the government faces growing criticism over security measures on the night of the attack, and the cameras could show where and how police were deployed.

Now this:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-police-officer-over-nice-bastille-day-claims

French minister sues police officer over Nice Bastille Day claims

Bernard Cazeneuve says Sandra Bertin’s allegation that interior ministry pressured her over report is ‘unworthy accusation’

France’s interior minister is suing a police officer who claimed the minister’s office pressed her to falsify a report on the security presence at the Nice Bastille Day celebrations that turned into a massacre.

Bernard Cazeneuve’s office vowed “transparency and truth” to put an end to what it described as “useless speculation” over how Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was able to plough a heavy goods vehicle at 55mph (90kph) through crowds on the Promenade des Anglais on 14 July.

“It was going at 90km/h without lights … It dodged the municipal police barrier. The team couldn’t stop it. You can’t burst the tyres of a 19-tonner with a revolver. Then other municipal police in plainclothes in the crowd were confronted with it,” she said.

“If they’d been armed like our national police colleagues have demanded, they could have stopped it. Finally the lorry came to the national police who shot and neutralised it.”

Bertin said: “I was harassed for an hour. I was ordered to include the specific positions of the national police, who I hadn’t seen on the screens.”

Bertin, who is secretary general of a Nice public servants union, said she eventually sent two copies of her report, “one version in a non-changeable PDF, the other modifiable. Then, several days later, the antiterrorist branch ordered me to erase the film of six cameras that I mentioned in my report that had captured the massacre … to prevent them being seen by the public.” Nice officials have refused to destroy the tapes.

Cazeneuve insisted the CSU officer sent to speak to Bertin was not sent by his interior ministry and said he was suing for defamation after “serious accusations” against him.

“It will be very useful if Madame Sandra Bertin could be questioned by the investigators and could give them the names and positions of the people she is accusing, the emails she is talking about and their contents,” Cazeneuve said in a statement.

Cazeneuve’s angry riposte was directed specifically at the Nice mayor, Christian Estrosi, of the opposition centre-right Les Républicains party, who has claimed the Bastille Day firework celebrations were insufficiently policed, given that the country has been under a state of emergency since the series of shootings and bombings in Paris in November.

The two politicians have spent the last two weeks batting claims and counter-claims at each other.

Irony is the desperate scramble to cover peoples' asses will get more flack than whatever gaps in policing they were trying to protect themselves from would have.