During the trial of the attack, the court ordered the restitution to the families of organs taken from the victims of the attack. Several families then requested DNA tests to be carried out.
Questions still unanswered. While four families of victims of the attack of July 14, 2016 in Nice were to receive this Tuesday, December 12, the results of analyzes concerning the organs taken during the autopsies, these tests could not be carried out, reports Nice morning.
In question, a time of preservation of the organs in formalin “far too long”, which “altered the tissues” and made these analyzes impossible, explains to our colleagues the lawyer for the victims’ families, Me Virginie Le Roy.
Requests for DNA tests
The four families had requested these analyzes even though the former public prosecutor, François Molins, had recognized last year during the trial of the attack an “excess of zeal” during the autopsies, where 173 organs had been removed on 14 victims, without their families being informed.
During the trial in November 2022, the court ordered the unsealing and the return of the organs to the families. While some had chosen to recover the organs for burial, others had requested DNA tests to ensure that the organs were those of their loved ones.
Maître Virginie Le Roy explains to Nice-Matin that the “DNA profiles attached to the seals are consistent”, but that there could however be no certainty without the results of the tests, which could not be carried out.
The families of the victims concerned will now have to choose between recovering the organs for burial, or requesting their destruction.
The issue of harvesting organs from the victims of the attack was a major point of the trial last year. Many families had denounced the lack of information on the sampling procedure, a process that the former public prosecutor had recognized as unjustified.
“If we had to do it again, there would have been no” organ harvesting, he concluded during a 2.5 hour speech.
A “very long” process for families
The removal of these organs was initially justified as a need for the advancement of the investigation. An argument refuted by the families of the victims.
“50% of the organs removed were not even harmed by the attack”, explained last October on BFM Nice Côte d’Azur Thierry Vimal, father of a victim, who had notably requested one of these DNA tests . He also assures that the organs removed were “in no way” useful to the investigation.
And while the court had ordered the return of the organs to the families more than a year ago, the victims’ relatives still highlighted the slowness of the process in the fall.
“It’s a long time. It’s been a year, and we still have no news,” lamented Thierry Vimal in October. “It’s very, very long, and you’re falling from a height.”
The lawyer for the victims’ families already estimated in November 2022 that the court’s order to return the organs did not repair the moral damage suffered by the families.
“What was done there is what should have been done six years ago,” Virgine Le Roy declared to BFM Nice Côte d’Azur, recalling that there had been “no “official apologies for these families” and that there was “not even a question” of compensation for moral damage during the trial.
2023-12-12 21:27:11
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