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B
A few days ago, when we were discussing ‘the film‘, you suggested that SAH “had invaded the US-computer server” and posited this as an act that precipitated the murders.
Do you have any specific server in mind, maybe the one in Billary’s basement? After all, he apparently was up-in-arms about the plans to reshape the middle east that ‘they’ had. It isn’t clear who ‘they’ were but if anyone were in a position to know about any such plans it would have been her.
I would have doubted that SAH was technicaly capable of such an ‘invasion’, however that particular server apparently wasn’t so much locked down, as sellotaped down.
Just a reminder, if one were needed, in the context of the origin of the murder weapon that the Swiss certainly are keen on their shooting.
@GIP
“had invaded the US-computer server” is not an information, it is an suggestion based on comments of this and others blogs (france2, …). Certainly an information is that @chelsea_on_tigris was unhappy with the “real” september 11 and the implications on Irak. It’s not new. As engineer, I think that he could enter in an unauthorized server, this job was simplified with credit on CERN or AIRBUS. But that is an hypothesis and it should be confirmed if can find a film with similar storyline …
perhaps EM know better that me if SAH was a “server intruder”.
I ask to him.
Peter
I agree completely with the first paragraph of your post however I have a minor quibble with the second.
“The pharmaceutical industry would like nothing better than to find ways of delivering a whole range of substances by means of transdermal patches, not just nicotine and capsaicine.”
Yes. Yes it would.
There has been a recent success with rivastigmine. A quick search reveals that it is indeed a small lipophilic (and hydrophilic) molecule.
Guess what? It’s a neurotransmitter esterase inhibitor that can be absorbed through the skin. That general class of compound sounds like it might have non-theraputic applications – and it does.
Check out the quasi-irreversible variety.
Spoilt for choice.
I wonder what happened to the activist/journalist. It’s clearly not suicide. So it’s either sudden natural death (which of course does happen) or murder.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/19/british-journalist-jacky-sutton-found-dead-in-istanbul-airport
@ Good In Parts, 19 Oct, 2015 – 5:40 pm
Yes, you are right, there is rivastigmine. However, I am sure that you will agree that there is a world of difference between sticking a huge plaster on a patient’s back for hours (and those transdermal patches are huge – one of the key problems with the rivastigmine patches is that the doses that can be delivered often are too small, with doctors running out of skin to stick them on before effective therapeutic doses can be reached) and smearing poison on a car’s steering wheel or on a doorknob that will make the victim drop dead after touching it.
I have researched this topic quite extensively – strictly for literary purposes, of course – and spoken to a number of toxicologists and pharmacologists. My conclusion is that “contact poisons” will either destroy the skin or will only work well if there are lesions in the skin, however minute. The infamous tribal custom of smearing one’s enemy’s doorstep with abrin, for example,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrin
only works because people within those societies frequently sustain tiny scratches on the soles of their bare feet.
Spiking the victim’s food or drink, contaminating his toothpaste, shooting him with some kind of dart or pellet, or (as they tried to do with Khalid Mashal) injecting him with a needleless jet injector whilst simultaneously opening a well-shaken can of a carbonated soft drink in order to mask the fizzing noise of the injector are all much more promising delivery mechanisms.
It is a shame, really 😉 If contact poisons really worked as advertised, they could make excellent plot devices, with everyday objects such as walking sticks or umbrellas becoming “cursed” after somebody used them to murder their original owners.
MORE UTTER MADNESS in South Eastern FRANCE
Gipsies set light to town and threaten residents to get another Gipsey released from prison.
Why do the FRENCH put up with this crap?
http://www.ledauphine.com/isere-sud/2015/10/20/tensions-a-moirans-la-rd-1085-coupee
A major fire of tires and car was lit Tuesday to 16 hours in Moirans on the 1085 R & D that is found and cut to traffic in both directions.
17:30 in a statement, the Isère prefecture says “diversions are in place in the direction Grenoble-Lyon: traffic is cut off at the roundabout Centr’Alpes and deflected towards Voiron. And in the direction Lyon-Grenoble: circulation is cut off at the junction 592 and deflected towards Tullins “.
5:25 p.m.: Twenty cars were destroyed in two fires.
5:05 p.m.: According to our information, the Railroads traffic should be interrupted between Lyon and Grenoble. A fire that also lit near the Moirans Train Station.
17.00: A helicopter of the gendarmerie now flies over the area.
4:55 p.m.: Moirans, schools were evacuated and children gathered in the gymnasium where their parents are called to pick them.
The mayor and a neighboring building were also evacuated as a precaution after received threats.
Residents of a retirement home, located close to the fire, were instructed to remain confined within the building.
Moreover, several houses nearby the fire were also evacuated.
4:50 p.m.: The fire was lit by members of the Traveller community settled in the town. They would demand the release of one of them, incarcerated, in order to attend a funeral of a close, one of the young died in the night of Friday to Saturday at the output of a road stolen car in Saint Joseph River.
The ” burning” place above in on the edge of Parc naturel régional de Chartreuse
about 25k from Chambéry, Savoie
the place where most of the “investigations” FOR this area seem to be based, not sure if this is where our hero Eric Maillaud is based?
http://s-www.ledauphine.com/images/2C979595-0769-4393-A1F9-309DD50CE798/LDL_V0_12/des-viotures-ont-ete-incendiees-sur-les-voies-photo-le-dl-1445356716.jpg
That looks like a massive fire, in England you can still be hung for setting light to the railways.
Cars were torched on ways
A major fire of tires and car was lit Tuesday to 16 hours in Moirans on the 1085 R & D that is found and cut to traffic in both directions.
18.30: The gendarmes arrived on the scene and begin to unfold.
6:25 p.m.: A building next to the train station and with a restaurant that was not used was burned.
6:20 p.m.: A command post was installed in Voreppe and a score of police officers of the departmental company response and the anti-crime brigand were sent as reinforcements.
6:15 p.m.: The college canteen would have been burned. Firefighters were stoned and gendarmes were threatened by a man showing off a weapon.
5:55 p.m.: Cars were set on fire on the tracks at the station would have been sacked. Cars were also burned in the parking lot of the station.
5:40 p.m.: Traffic lines train Grenoble-Lyon-Grenoble and Valence was “temporarily interrupted,” the SNCF on its website.
Time for the gloves to come off and the FRENCH RUBBER HORSE COCK
to come out of the shadows?
Remember the person who shot and killed Nicole Communal-Tournier was a Gypsie from Ugine.
I expect that person is being held in Aiton prison
Aiton Prison is currently under siege by the interned gypsies
https://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=https://www.francebleu.fr/infos/faits-divers-justice/un-detenu-s-evade-de-la-prison-d-aiton-en-savoie-1431571327&prev=search
Aiton Prison, Savoie, is conveniently located between the Gendarmerie in Chambéry
and Grignon.
P
The slightly snarky point I was trying to make was that a lot of research has already been done (eg at Porton Down in the UK) on certain skin adsorbable poisons, otherwise known as nerve agents.
I strongly suspect (but have no supporting evidence for whatsoever) that there has been some ‘crosstown traffic’ of personnel between such labs and pharma development teams following the end of the cold war. Call it a peace dividend if you like.
Ironically, I also suspect that the pharma teams are much, much, more productive both in terms of generating candidate compounds and screening them. There must be a huge pile of near misses and a somewhat smaller pile of total rejects. The reject pile would be of obvious interest to certain actors.
Perhaps your next protagonist could be sourcing designer contact poisons from such a lab. The compounds could be tailored to be specific to the target’s particular esterase allelle variant. The masking agents could come from a disgraced cycle team medic.
Previously you wrote:-
“It is usually done because you want the murder to look like a natural death, at least for as long as it takes your assassin(s) to make good their escape.”
If and it is a very big if Jimmy was whacked, then your reasoning above makes perfect sense. I suggested something similar.
If the target was only to be the family of the al-Hilli ( car -load)
why not force them over a cliff.
IF the target was also to be the local cyclist Sylvain Mollier, something masty but ordinary could also happen to him, whilst he was out on his own up a dark combe.
but to spectacularly and internationally slaughter the lot of them in one place at one time,
this would seem to be a very powerful, wide-world “MESSAGE”
Gypsies riot in South East FRANCE
http://www.france24.com/en/20151021-travellers-inmates-riot-southeast-france-prison-leave-isere-moirans
Gypsies in South East FRANCE
torched dozens of cars in violent protests while inmates at a nearby Aiton jail rioted Tuesday after authorities refused a prisoner’s request for prison leave to attend his brother’s funeral.
The incident occurred less than two months after a similar flare-up involving gypsies, Prime Minister Manuel Valls demanded a firm response.
Members of the local gypsie community in the FRENCH Alpine town of Moirans had requested leave for two jailed gypsies, so that they could attend the funeral of a 17 year-old – a sibling of one of the two inmates – who had died in an accident last weekend while riding IN A STOLEN CAR.
But a judge turned down the request,
the local town hall and prosecutor’s office said.
Members of the community then blocked off a road, set fire to cars and ransacked the restaurant at the town’s train station, the town hall,
in what local media described as scenes of
URBAN GUERRILLA FIGHTING.
The authorities brought in 120 police and 100 firefighters to Moirans,
who brought the situation under control in the early evening without casualties,
unnamed officials said.
A riot also erupted in a prison at Aiton, about 100 kilometres (60 miles) away, where one of the prisoners is being held.
Around 20 inmates set fire to a passageway and destroyed the locks on their cells, according to a trade union official, who said a unit specialising in returning order to prisons had been called in.
A prison warden quoted by local daily newspaper Dauphiné libéré said at least twice as many inmates were involved in the riot, which lasted several hours.
“They smashed everything: tables, chairs, electrical appliances. They set fire to rubbish bins and blocked their cell locks,” he said.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls took to Twitter to condemn the “UNACCEPTABLE VIOLENCE” and demand “firmness – restoration of order.”
The violence comes less than two months after gypsies in Northern FRANCE blocked a motorway after authorities refused to temporarily release the son of a shooting victim to attend his father’s funeral, with the opposition criticising the government’s response as weak.
Aiton prsion, Savoie
Earlier, the journalists blocked the entrance scroll saw a brush fire engines, gendarmerie and technical services. Before the press conference, held outside the prison by the public prosecutor, Jean-Pascal Violet, the inter-regional director of prison services from Rhône-Alpes Auvergne, Emmanuel Fenard and the sub-prefect of St. John -of-Maurienne. The three men chose their words:
“The brother of the young man died in the accident in Saint-Joseph-de-Rivière (Isère, note) was sentenced to five years in prison for flights, it has six sentences its assets,
“the prosecutor justifies Albertville. Aged 24, the man was not allowed to attend the funeral of his younger brother 17 years. He is the cause of the mutiny that some detainees entered “opportunism” in the direction of the detention center. In the same center, another relative had also requested a furlough but would not have participated in the mutiny.
Today we expect the call made by the lawyer of the gypsies to know, or no, if not or will attend the funeral of his brother postponed to Thursday.
So one of the gypsies in in prison in Aiton for five years, and has six convictions under his belt by the age of 24.
One of his younger brothers steals a car and dies in a road accident.
The judge will not (yet) let the criminal brother out of prison for the funeral.
So the gypsies set fire to tyres and cars and drive burning vehicles onto the railway.
The prison erupts into a riot.
Let us not forget that a local gypsie is being held for the shooting of
Nicole Communal-Tournier.
http://www.ledauphine.com/savoie/2015/10/21/journee-de-mutinerie-cauchemardesque-a-la-prison-d-aiton
This is serious, repeated Illegality.
IF the FRENCH state buckles under this onslaught they are pathetic,
it will show other groups that perceived political correctness allows you to defy the law of the land.
@ Good In Parts, 20 Oct, 2015 – 8:09 pm
A disgraced cycling team medic … I love it!
Anyway, any nation state determined to use selective poisonings as an instrument of clandestine warfare should either stick to well-known substances in widespread clinical use (as Israel has) or conduct a lot of lethal experiments on humans (as the Soviet Union did).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_laboratory_of_the_Soviet_secret_services
With generic hospital drugs such as succinylcholine or fentanyl, pretty much any doctor can hazard an educated guess regarding the required lethal dose. However, when it comes to exotic poisons such as ricin, the data are extremely scarce and the LD-50 doses published in the literature are nothing but wild guesses. (How many people are known to have died of ricin poisoning each year? Perhaps one or two, I would guess. How many people ingested a supposedly fatal dose of ricin and woke up the next morning with nothing more than an upset stomach? Nobody knows.) As lethal doses vary with the mode of application and a whole host of other factors, there is no alternative to conducting realistic tests on humans – a rather joyless task that does not attract the best and the brightest of scientists. Thus, I don’t think that there is too much crossover between the legitimate pharmaceutical industry and those murderous backroom boys.
P
Presumably your approach to writing is like Forsyth who apparently used journalistic research methods to generate detailed and accurate background for his novels.
Fiction as a genre allows us to go further though, into the realm of the possible or probable near-future. Quite what that near-future could look like from a toxin perspective (given state-level resources) I do not know.
When you spoke to toxicologists and pharmacologists, did you ask them what was coming down the track?
@ Good In Parts, 21 Oct, 2015 – 6:01 pm
Alas, no, I didn’t ask them about their expectations regarding potential new toxins that might be “in the pipeline”. One crucial fact to understand, which I only understood belatedly, is that most toxicologists are medical statisticians studying the potentially harmful effects of everyday substances such as PFOA, cigarette vapourizer liquids or asbestos. Ask them about potentially ultra-deadly frog poisons from the Amazonas Basin or some such, and they will reply, “How would I know? What do I care?”. Finding a toxicologist who actually takes an interest in substances that you and I would call “poisons” requires a major effort and is (or at least was in my own case) none too fruitful.
However, one thing that I have learned in the course of my research is that well-known substances (with well-known LD-50 doses for humans) win out over more esoteric, potentially more deadly substances, almost every time. The Italian lowlife who killed Georgi Markov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi_Markov
used his weapon on another exile shortly beforehand, and that person felt nothing but a brief bout of flu-like symptoms afterwards. Likewise, I have often enjoyed a “Fugu” meal prepared in one of the countless restaurants surrounding Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market. The most prized skill of a Fugu chef – a profession with a mandatory ten-year training period – is to leave just enough of the pufferfish’s deadly poison tetrodotoxin within the fish, such that the flesh appears to tickle your tongue like Champagne and will numb your gums like Sichuan pepper. Having enjoyed (and survived) quite a few of those dinners, during which each bite of fish appeared to crackle and pop upon my tongue like soda powder, I am somewhat skeptical regarding the official supposed LD-50 dose for tetrodotoxin.
I was always told when handling LSD not to touch the blotter as it would activate transdermally.
still comes back as… local man, local killer ! Sorry guys.
Local as in “known now dead” or just “local”.
Pop. Chevaline = 207
Pop. Lathuile + 729
So total population of both villages less than one thousand souls.
I know some think the case of Nicole Communal-Tournier is unconnected with
the Slaughter of the Horses, (different MO mainly).
Let’s just run through a few connections.
Only two miles between the two killing places.
Only a few metres between L’Ideal killing place and the place where
the hero,
William Brett Martin is/was residing. ( now that is a BIG coincident)
After waiting 13 months, finally the authorities release the E-FIT-SKETCH of the motorcyclist ( possibly the killer of Le Martinet)
six days after the release of the E-FIT-SKETCH,( now that is also a BIG coincident)
the home of the Communal-Tournier family is night raided by five local armed men,
equipped with restraints, they shoot Nicole through the chest, with a shotgun.
Now to me an ordinary burgalry is undertaken by one person.
It is undertaken without guns.
It is undertaken without restraints.
No victim is shot through the chest with a shotgun.
Valubles are removed.
Unless it is a bank / train robbery – you do not have five people.
This was undertaken to “persuade” the Communal-Tournier family
however they were not persuadable.
However we have been given no insight into what the Communal-Tournier family
“needed” to be persuaded into,
if a court case were to happen, we might learn but more than a year after the capture of the five locals, as far as we are aware it has all gone dead?
P
The main thing that I am aware of coming down the track, as it were, is the whole ‘nano’ thing. There have been a few campaign groups trying to create a bandwaggon to leach off but they havn’t got traction.
I guess there is a very small probability that some variety of nanotube could an asbestos like effect in the long term – but that doesn’t help you!
Still carbon nanotubes embedded in the surface of a toothbrush could act as unfeelably sharp nano syringes carying a payload of viral particles.
@ Good In Parts, 22 Oct, 2015 – 1:12 pm
Although I am a layman, I believe that there is good reason to worry about the long-term public-health implications of nano materials, not of the weaponised variety, but the everyday kind routinely added to cosmetics and foodstuffs. This is a hot topic amongst toxicologists, too, because the long-term consequences could be disastrous, but nobody has any firm idea what they are going to be. The only thing that everybody agrees upon is that the process is irreversible: once that stuff is “out there”, inside our bodies and in our environment, it is going to stay there forever.
From the point of view of a (real or fictitious) poisoner, acquiring access to the intended victim’s toothbrush and/or toothpaste is a major win, even without any carbon nanotubes. There is real-life precedent for that delivery mechanism. German athlete Dieter Baumann, who won the 5000-metres race at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, was tested positive for steroid doping in 1999. He claimed that his toothpaste had been contaminated with the anabolic steroid nandrolone by parties unknown. Of course nobody believed that lame excuse. However, he was (more or less) rehabilitated after lab tests found that his toothpaste had indeed been tampered with. The case still divides public opinion, but – so I am told by sports journalists – ever since, german top athletes are officially instructed to keep their dental hygiene kit under lock and key at all times whilst competing abroad, never to use complimentary dental hygiene kits and so forth. In many sporting disciplines, minding the toothpaste has become part of the national team coaches’ job description.
Anyway, to return to the subject in hand: I fear that it is too late now for an autopsy of the late Jim Thompson to be meaningful. IF he was poisoned, there is a good chance that the toxin would no longer be detectable.
P
Yes, the everyday stuff not the grey goo doomsday
It surprises me that there are not more incidents like the Dieter Baumann affair. In other mandatory testing regimes such as military, corporate and prisons there are regular mass spiking events as cover-ups, with targeted spiking being used for revenge etc.
Jimmy is still a niggle for me. If his death is purely a coincidence, it is surely the mother of all coincidences.
Nicole Communal-Tournier
She was murdered, at night, in her home, above the family business in Lahuile, six days after the E-FIT-SKETCH of the mysterious biker from LYON was issued.
It has been said he was tracked down because he used his mobile phone in Lathuile but it took the FRENCH authorities, quite a time, yet although he is exonerated 95%,
we still do not know the name of this biker, nor have we heard more of the remaining 5% ?
Nicole was shot through the chest with a shotgun by a local man from UGINE, which coincidentally is where Sylvain Mollier comes from and also where Patrice Menegaldo was found dead from gunshot wounds in his flat, in peculiar circumstances.
Our hero William Brett Martin has a house, just metres away from Nicole.
Two men from Lathuile were arrested( don’t know what for, maybe gun running?)
Eric Devouassoux and his chum Jean-Luc Falcy
Jean-Luc Falcy
414 Chemin des Fontaines
74210 Lathuile
Jean-Luc lives in close proximity to the widow of the now dead mayor of Doussard,
Jean-Claude Deronzier, who was also the presidenent of the intercommunity based in Faverges.
Jean-Paul Deronzier was leading the struggle against the community of gens du voyage,
shortly before he fell to his doom.
His sons are married to the daughters of Jean-Paul Communal-Tournier, the husband of Nicole.
A member of the community of gens du voyage ( from Ugine)
is the person who pulled the trigger on Nicole.
Yet the FRENCH think it is not a FRENCH thing,
they can’t get to the bottom of anything?
Jean-Claude Deronzier fell off a cliff
Jean-Paul Communal-Tournier husband of Nicole
MN & J
I still hold that ‘anything is possible’, though with the probability distribution significantly skewed from my initial assessment, principally because the passing of time and the discovery of witnesses (such as LMC) have rendered some tracks much, much, less likely. I certainly agree that local tracks have increased in likelyhood.
Have you completely ‘gone local’ James? If so, what is your definition of ‘local’? Does it extend as far as Geneva?
Implicitly ‘local’ as defined by MN only includes the approx. one thousand souls resident in Chevaline and Doussard. Should Giez or other surrounding villages really be excluded? It also seems ungenerous to exclude non-residents who were were working or touring in the area at the time.
One could easily argue the case that ‘local’ had to include Ugine, Grignon and anywhere that SM had been cycling or seducteurising in the last 20 years. Effectively that could mean the whole of the Haute Savoie.
At a stretch, if SAH was the target, then anywhere that SAH had travelled to during his excursions from the campsites should be included. Personally, I don’t think we need to go quite that far.
My current most likely ‘local scenario’ uses a generous definition of local.
Apart from the other things* the most useful thing the gendarmes could do would be to re-run the reconstruction now that they have found the LMC.
(*) The other things would include:-
finding the X5
finding the photographer
finding the campsite visitor.