French police are not legally at fault for the suicide of a man who leapt to his death while in police custody a day after allegedly gunning down eight councilors, the French Justice Ministry said this afternoon.
In a brief statement issued after a second judicial inquiry, the ministry said prosecutors expected "no legal action" to be taken against officers who were questioning Richard Durn when he scrambled through a small fourth-floor window in a police building in Paris.
The day before his March 28th suicide, police say, Durn went on a shooting rampage, killing the local councilors and wounding 19 other people at a routine municipal meeting in the northwestern Paris suburb of Nanterre.
Those who survived the massacre and relatives of the victims have pushed for a full inquiry into the circumstances of Durn's death after an initial probe found police officers were not guilty of negligence serious enough to merit legal proceedings.
And Saturday, lawyers representing Durn's mother Stefania Durn said they would file a complaint seeking to establish what happened to Durn while he was in custody.
"Madame Durn hopes, for the sake of the victims and those close to them, that the full story behind her son's death comes to light," her lawyers said in a statement.
In a confession published earlier this week in Le Parisien newspaper, Durn told police he had only intended to kill Nanterre mayor Jacqueline Fraysse, who survived the attack and has emerged as a chief critic of police handling of the matter.
While some French have had no qualms welcoming Durn's death at his own hands, some fear it could cut short an investigation into how he bypassed France's relatively strict gun laws to obtain a license in 1997.
The local prefecture that granted Durn the license has not yet explained why it did so despite a history of threatening behavior. It is also unclear why it did not require him to return his guns when he failed to renew his license in 2000.
The worst massacre in France in years has thrust law and order to the center in the run-up to the presidential election, which pits incumbent Jacques Chirac against Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.
The conservative Chirac, campaigning on a "zero-tolerance" law-and-order stance similar to that of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, implicitly attacked Jospin's government over the Nanterre killings, saying they fit a pattern of growing lawlessness.