French government 'suppressed' reports of Bataclan victim's castration torture

The French government has been accused of suppressing details of horrific torture endured by several of the victims of the November 2015 massacre in Paris's Bataclan theatre. The chief police witness in France's parliament testified to a government committee that a colleague had vomited in front of him after seeing disfigured bodies.

Some of the torture was said to include eyes being gouged out, disembowelment, men who were castrated and had their testicles shoved in their mouths, and women who were stabbed in the genitals. The committee heard the torture was filmed for Islamic State (Isis) propaganda.

The details were revealed during 14 hours of testimony given about the Paris attacks given on 21 March, but they were only released to the public on 5 July. The witnesses said the acts took place on the second floor of the theatre, after three terrorists took concert-goers who were watching the band Eagles of Death Metal perform hostage.

In total, 89 people died in the attack at the Bataclan, with an additional 40 people dying elsewhere in Paris that night. Medics were said to have not released the bodies of the worst torture victims to the families, a report by HeatStreet said.

The investigator told the inquiry: "After the assault, we were with colleagues at the passage Saint-Pierre Amelot when I saw weeping from one of our colleagues who came outside to vomit. He told us what he had seen."

The investigator said that some of the bodies had also been beheaded. Yet these claims have been refuted by prosecutors who say that no sharp knives were found at the scene and that the mutilations were caused by the detonation of explosive devices containing nails, bolts, shrapnel and rapid gunfire.

The inquiry heard from the president of the committee, Georges Fenech, that a father had been told while visiting his son's body at the morgue that the right side of his face was unrecognisable because terrorists had "punctured his eye and sliced down the right side of his face".

The report states: "On the causes of the death of my son A, at the forensic institute in Paris, I was told, and what a shock it was for me at that moment, they had cut off his testicles, had put them in his mouth, and he was disembowelled.

"When I saw him behind glass, lying on a table, a white shroud covering it up to the neck, a psychologist was with me. He said, 'This is the only presentable part, your son's left profile'. I found that he had no right eye.

"I made the remark. I was informed that they had punctured his eye and sliced down the right side of his face, where there was a very large hematoma that we could all see."

Asked how the man's body parts had ended up in his mouth the prosecutor replied: "I do not have that information."

The parliamentary inquiry into security failings in France has affirmed that the nation needs to set up a national counterterrorism agency to oversee the fight against terrorists amongst 40 other proposals. They believe that poor coordination between security services in France and at European level allowed crucial information to not be passed on about the Isis (Daesh) militants.