Paul Barril

Paul Barril was born on 13 April 1946 in Vinay, in the Isère department of south-eastern France. He was the son and grandson of gendarmes; his grandfather was badly wounded at Verdun in the First World War and received the Legion of Honour, the Military Medal and the Croix de guerre. Barril grew up moving between the gendarmerie stations where his father was posted, and saw the gendarmerie as a vocation from an early age.

He trained at the gendarmerie officers' school, the École des officiers de la Gendarmerie nationale, where he was taught by Colonel Michel Veillon, and graduated top of his year. He was a karate black belt, a qualified paratrooper, a combat swimmer and a marksman, with a lifelong fascination for weapons and anti-terrorist equipment.

In 1974 Barril took part in the creation of the Groupe d'intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale (GIGN), the gendarmerie's new hostage rescue and counter-terrorism unit, under Christian Prouteau. Prouteau set the strategy and Barril, his deputy, led on the ground. In 1979 he was part of the GIGN team sent to advise the Saudi authorities during the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca.

After the rue Marbeuf car bombing in Paris on 22 April 1982, he worked with Prouteau to create the anti-terrorist cell at the Élysée Palace under President François Mitterrand, and in July 1982 he became interim commander of the GIGN. In August 1982 three Irish nationals were arrested in Vincennes and presented by the Élysée as dangerous terrorists. The investigation revealed serious irregularities, including weapons and explosives said to have been placed in their flat, and the men were released. Barril was not prosecuted, but on 17 September 1992 he lost the defamation case he had brought against Le Monde over an article by Edwy Plenel; the Paris court found that the journalist had proved his account and that the operation had been a set-up by Barril, a ruling upheld on appeal.

Badly injured in a training accident in 1983, he left the GIGN, and in 1984 he was placed on leave from the gendarmerie at his own request. He founded the security firm Epsylon in Paris and later ran SECRETS, a company offering security services abroad. His reputation opened doors in the Gulf emirates and in African states and he advised several heads of state, notably in Africa.

In Rwanda he was approached in 1989 about reorganising the intelligence services and was close to President Juvénal Habyarimana's wife, Agathe Habyarimana, and her circle. After Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down on 6 April 1994, Barril was hired by the widow to investigate, and he became a leading promoter of the theory that the Rwandan Patriotic Front was responsible. On 28 May 1994, during the genocide against the Tutsi, he signed an agreement with the interim government's prime minister, Jean Kambanda, for assistance including the supply of weapons and ammunition and training. In 2013 the FIDH, the Ligue des droits de l'homme and Survie filed a complaint accusing him of complicity in genocide, and an investigation was opened. He always denied the accusations. He was made an assisted witness in 2020, but medical experts concluded that his illness no longer allowed him to be questioned, and he was never charged.

In the Élysée wiretapping case he was among seven defendants convicted in 2005 by the Paris criminal court, receiving a six-month suspended prison sentence and a 5,000 euro fine for receiving documents that breached privacy. In December 2007 he was charged and briefly held at Les Baumettes prison in Marseille in an investigation linked to the Concorde gaming club in Paris; he was released on bail in January 2008 and acquitted by the Marseille criminal court on 25 September 2013.

He wrote several books, including Missions très spéciales (1984), Guerres secrètes à l'Élysée (1996), L'enquête explosive (2000), Les archives secrètes de Mitterrand (2001), Paroles d'honneur (2014) and C'était pour la France (2023). In his 1996 book he questioned the official account of the death of François de Grossouvre, and he was later ordered to pay fines and damages for defaming the former Élysée official Gilles Ménage.

In 2018 he told the gendarmerie magazine L'Essor that he would in the end have liked simply to finish his career as a gendarmerie general. In March 2014 he disclosed that he had Parkinson's disease and was on heavy medication, and he also had thyroid cancer. In June 2014 a misunderstanding led police intervention officers to believe he had barricaded himself, armed, in his home at Cap d'Antibes; a gendarmerie commander resolved the situation and he was taken to hospital in a very weak state.

Paul Barril died on the evening of Tuesday 20 October 2026, aged 80. The GIGN announced his death to Agence France-Presse on 21 October. He had been ill for many years with Parkinson's disease and thyroid cancer; the place of death and any immediate cause were not stated in the first reports. His death was reported by AFP, franceinfo, 20 Minutes, La Croix and Le Monde, which described him as a former Élysée gendarme turned controversial mercenary.

Barril is remembered both as one of the founding figures of the GIGN, the unit that shaped modern French counter-terrorism and hostage rescue, and as a symbol of the abuses of the Élysée anti-terrorist cell in the 1980s. The Irish of Vincennes affair and the wiretapping scandal became lasting reference points in debates about secret power under Mitterrand. His dealings in Rwanda kept him at the centre of investigations into France's role during the 1994 genocide, questions that remained unresolved at his death because his illness had made further questioning impossible.