Pierre Galopin

Pierre Alphonse Galopin (Clermont-Ferrand, 10 January 1932 – , 4 April 1975 ) was a commandant of the French Army who served as a deputy to intelligence officer Camille Gourvennec in Chad during the 1960s and 1970s. He came to international attention when he was captured by a group of Chadian rebels under Hissène Habré on 4 August 1974 in the remote Tibesti Mountains, thus becoming one of the hostages in the so-called Claustre Affair. After subsequent negotiations stalled, Galopin was executed by hanging on 4 April 1975.

Biography Galopin had spent most of his professional career in the Sahara region. As a colonial officer, he partook in operations in Indochina, Algeria and Mauritania. He subsequently served in Chad during much of the period from independence in 1960 until his death.

In Chad, Galopin was deputy to Camille Gourvennec, both as deputy commander of the Nomad and National Guard and as deputy security adviser to the Chadian president François Tombalbaye. Gourvennec himself was director of the Chadian secret police BCSR. In that capacity, he was responsible for hunting down, interrogating and torturing several of Tombalbaye's opponents. Furthermore, declassified French intelligence sources indicate that Galopin's mission had secret underlying objectives (as was the case during his earlier negotiations in 1968–69): fomenting dissent among the rebel troops and gathering intelligence about their functioning.

On 4 August 1974, during negotiations, Habré suddenly seized Galopin and added him to the hostages taken earlier. Whereas the rebels had already requested ransom money for the other hostages, they now asked to be supplied with weaponry and ammunition in exchange for liberating Galopin. The advent of Pierre Claustre as negotiator in late 1974 helped to convince the rebels to modify their demands surrounding the other hostages. However, the negotiations surrounding Galopin stalled and the rebels announced that they would execute him on 4 April 1975 if no weapons were delivered; they also stated that Galopin was being put on trial by the FROLINAT through a "revolutionary tribunal" for his earlier actions in northern Chad. Goukouni later claimed (in May 1979, at a stage where he was embroiled in political conflict with Habré) that Habré had been opposed to this death sentence and criticized him harshly for this.