No trace of cult couple in France
Published By admin with Comments 0
The mysterious French couple from Sutherland who died in a police shoot-out on Friday were South African citizens.
But police know little about the lives of Philippe Meniere and Agnes Jardel, nor do they regard it as a priority to find out who they were.
On Sunday Colonel Hendrik Swartz, Northern Cape police spokesman, said the two had South African citizenship, passports and ID numbers.
“They were born in France and lived there, and as far as we can establish Meniere came to South Africa some time in the early 1980’s. We’re still trying to find out when they arrived. We don’t know if they had kept their French citizenship as well,” Swartz said.
A French television journalist, Frédéric Couderc, who travelled to Sutherland to cover the incident, said he and colleagues in Paris could not find any details about the couple, nor any confirmation that he was a medical doctor trained in France.
But police were confident Meniere was a qualified doctor.
“We’ve got his certificates, we have them in our possession and can confirm that he worked at Johannesburg General Hospital and I think Baragwanath as well and Coronation Hospital. We don’t know much about the lady. Their background is not a focus of our investigation,” Swartz said.
The couple have not been officially identified yet, nor have any French relatives of either of them been traced.
“The French embassy is helping us with that.”
Couderc, who lives in Paris, said that 6000-10 000 people “go missing” in France each year.
“They just disappear, nobody knows why or where they go. Maybe they want to change their lives. Some maybe stay in France and change their names, maybe some go and live in another country, I don’t know. So maybe these people were like that, because we can find nothing about them. My friend in Paris has been trying to get information about them, but until now, we get nothing,” Couderc said.
Couderc was on holiday in Cape Town when a French television channel asked him to cover the search for the French couple in Sutherland.
Some Sutherland residents knew that Jardel had been involved in advertising and had worked for the Shoprite/Checkers chain.
Former colleagues of Jardel remember her as “dynamic and brilliant” in her advertising work for Shoprite, and described her as “petite, delicate, and very attractive”.
A former colleague, Cobie van Oort, said she had worked with Jardel for the OK in Johannesburg from the early to the late 1990’s. In 1998, both had moved to Shoprite’s head office in Brackenfell when Shoprite had bought the OK company.
Regarding the death of police officer Jacob Boleme, Van Oort is quoted as saying: “It is a terrible story. I cannot reconcile the person I knew with those deeds. It’s impossible for me to comprehend.”
Van Oort had met Meniere twice when the couple lived in Parow. She described him as “friendly, clever and interesting”.
She said the couple was already involved in the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, which she thought was a type of “self-help group where they meditated”.
The cult, run by Judy Zebra Knight in Yelm in the US, has distanced itself from the couple, and say the movement is non-violent. It teaches how a person can “create the nature of reality”.
Police still will not say whether officers opened fire on the couple first, and whether they died from police bullets or their own.
“We have to wait for official reports,” Swartz said – which could take months.
Content retrieved from: https://iol.co.za/news/south-africa/northern-cape/2011-01-24-no-trace-of-cult-couple-in-france/.
