FromThe Bookseller:
La Fabrique’s foreign rights manager Ernest Moret has been released from police custody, after being arrested and detained by British anti-terrorist police upon his arrival at London St Pancras station, ahead of London Book Fair.
The Metropolitan Police confirmed to The Bookseller that Ernest was bailed on the evening of 19th April.
His phone and work computer were seized by officers for interrogation, according to the French publisher and its collaborator Verso Books. Moret’s lawyer, Richard Parry from Saunders Solicitors, said that the rights manager will be required to return to London in May.
Pension reform demonstrations have rocked France over the past three months, with the French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, attributing any violence on those on the Left. Police were allegedly interested in Moret’s writing on recent events, and any participation he may have had in the protests, according to Parry.
The publishers said in a statement: “Ernest was interrogated for several hours and asked some very disturbing questions: his point of view on the pension reform in France, on the French government, on Emmanuel Macron, his opinion on the Covid crisis… Perhaps most seriously, during his interrogation, he was asked to name the ’anti-government’ authors in the catalogue of the publishing house La Fabrique, for which he works.”
The Metropolitan Police refused to provide any comment regarding what was raised during police interviews.
Link to the rest at The Bookseller
An easily-overlooked foreign rights manager by day, but . . . .
Sadly, this example also shows the utter incompetence of the respective “security services.” Unless this individual was a suspected operative, it was stoooooooooooopid to disclose that he/his communications were under suspicion by hauling him in for questioning when he took a foreign trip of the kind that would be well known to anyone with whom he was communicating. Thus, they’d change their communications systems… or use the now-known surveillance pipeline to inject misinformation into the counterintelligence system. <sarcasm> But no foreign intelligence agency, terrorist organization, or other inimical conspiracy has ever done that. </sarcasm> (OK, they haven’t been caught at it. Publicly. In the last week.)
That is…extraordinarily troubling, and something that I fear is part of a larger intolerance of dissent against the prevailing narrative, whatever that narrative happens to be.
To be frank, the proposed pension reforms are probably necessary, but that doesn’t matter; going after people who publish books whose authors might know people involved in protests, or even riots, goes too far.