In alchemy, the athanor is the furnace that allows the mysterious transmutation of metals. In Freemasonry, Athanor is the name inevitably linked to a lodge once affiliated with the Grand Lodge of the Masonic Alliance of France (GLAMF), involved in a series of murders and revenge attacks, with spies, ex-soldiers, and police officers as supporting characters in a true thriller plot.
Four members of Athanor, including the Worshipful Master Jean-Luc Bagur, are now in the dock this week among the 22 accused of belonging to what eventually became a genuine mafia network, with connections to French intelligence and security services. The Freemasonry trial will last three months, with daily installments that started on Monday with great anticipation.
The event that triggered the enigmatic scheme was the attempted murder of a woman, Marie-Hélène Dini, whom Jean-Luc Bagur tried to kill with the help of his right-hand man, Sébastien Leroy, and with the alleged complicity of two other lodge members, former journalist Frédéric Vagio and former member of the Central Directorate of the Ministry of the Interior Daniel Beaulieu, who could be sentenced alongside the master to life imprisonment.
"Madam, you have been the victim of a murder attempt"... This was the news Dini received six years ago when the police received an anonymous call warning of the presence of two suspicious individuals waiting for her in a black Renault Clio with a fake license plate outside her home in Créteil.
"That day I knew that my life was worth 70,000 euros," Vini declared. The two thugs arrested, former soldiers assigned to the General Directorate of External Security - known by the code names Adélard and Dagomar - carried out orders after receiving the mentioned sum to "eliminate a Mossad agent". "I have never set foot in Israel, so that accusation was absurd," warned Marie Hélène Vini, who will testify.
"The most terrible thing for my client was to think that the protagonists of the murder attempt - police officers, intelligence agents, Freemasons - were precisely people whose job was to safeguard society," declared the victim's lawyer, Jean-William Vezionet, at the start of the trial.
The investigation into the murder attempt led to Sébastian Leroy, Bagur's right-hand man, who apparently tried to get rid of Vini because she was competing with him as a coach for entrepreneurs. Leroy's confession helped uncover the existence of a network linked to the Athanor lodge, responsible for at least one murder, that of rally driver Laurent Pasquali, whose body was found in a forest nine months after his disappearance (he was killed over an unpaid debt to another lodge member, Frédéric Vaglio).
There was another murder attempt, that of the union leader, a worker at a plastics factory and activist of the Yellow Vests movement, Hassan Touzani, considered "troublesome" by his employers, who are also being judged for their links to the Masonic lodge leaders.
"We are dealing with individuals who acted driven by a sense of omnipotence," warned the union leader's lawyer, Dylan Slama, in the early stages of the trial where they try to demonstrate how Bagur, Vaglio, and Beaulieu used the lodge as a cover to orchestrate intimidations and personal revenge attacks in their immediate environment.
In 2019, a business partner of Jean-Luc Bagur who threatened to report him for fraud within their company one day found her car burnt out. In another case of alleged industrial espionage, a woman working for a competitor company was attacked on the street, and her computer was stolen executed on the orders of the master.
In the trial, the prosecution will try to demonstrate how the Masonic lodge Athanor, created in the financial suburb of Puteaux in Paris, deviated from its initial purpose as a "fraternal initiatory organization" into a true criminal cell, recruiting very specific profiles, such as former intelligence agents, police officers, military personnel, and private security specialists. A doctor and an engineer are also among the accused.
The trial has sparked in France a debate about the links between law enforcement and Freemasonry. In the UK, following a complaint filed by two police officers who identified themselves as Masons, a high court recognized the "legitimacy" of Scotland Yard in demanding that its officers declare if they are or have been members of the Masonic lodge, as part of a campaign to restore "public trust in the police".