THE mysterious death of the wife of a senior French government official, killed in 1957 by an exploding cigar box, has come a step closer to being solved after two Czech spies were charged with her murder. Following a nine-year investigation, two former agents of the Statni Bezpecnost - the secret police in communist Czechoslovakia - identified only as Stanislav T and Milan M, both aged 78, will stand trial in Prague early next year for the murder of Henriette Trémeaud, the wife of Andre-Marie Trémeaud, the prefect of the eastern French city of Strasbourg, on 17 May, 1957.On that day, Mr Trémeaud's secretary had placed a box of cigars in a drawer in the private apartment of the prefect and his wife. The cigars had been posted four days previously in Paris. The same evening, Mrs Trémeaud opened the box, which blew up in her face, killing her instantly.
Her death immediately became the subject of a lengthy investigation by the French secret services, the DST. They discovered a plot to destabilise the nascent European Community. The Czech agents had expected that Mr Trémeaud would receive the parcel the following day, during a reception in honour of a meeting of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) that was being attended by several senior French politicians. A campaign was being waged, under Soviet auspices, to sow distrust between France and Germany. The agents had been sending hate-mail to French politicians, designed to look as if it came from German neo-Nazis.
René Meyer, a former head of the DST, explained how the hate-mail led to the Czechs. "They were written in German and contained errors in syntax which are only made by Sudetes [Germans who had settled a long time previously in Czechoslovakia]," he said. The French secret services identified the members of the Czech spy ring responsible for the attack but failed to arrest the four agents before they escaped behind the Iron Curtain. Now, following the launch of an investigation by the Czech interior minister in Prague almost 50 years later, two of the men accused of being responsible will finally stand trial. The two other suspects in the bomb attack died before they could be arrested.
Jan Srb, a spokesman for the Czech bureau of investigations into communist crimes, said: "Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain and the former adversaries of the West were beginning to become allies. This was hard for the Communist regimes of the East to digest."
"For this sort of crime there is no statutory limitation," said Pavel Zavadil, of the Czech information agency. If the two men are found guilty, Mr Zavadil believes they would escape lightly for Mrs Trémeaud's murder. "In view of their advanced age I think that the judges will be merciful," he said.