It’s like a film, says hypnotist caught in spy murder plot A French business coach and hypnosis specialist has learned that she narrowly escaped death at the hands of a hit squad with links to the secret services. They were alleged to be working for freemasons on a contract from a professional rival. Marie-Hélène Dini, 55, who runs a corporate coaching firm from her home in Créteil, a southern Parisian suburb, said yesterday that she felt as if she had landed in the middle of a spy film. In the early morning last July, after a call from a vigilant neighbour, police detained two black-clad and gloved men with a military-issue pistol and silencer who were waiting in a car outside her home. They identified themselves as soldiers with the “action service”, the military section in the general directorate of external security (DGSE), the equivalent to MI6. They said they were on an official mission to kill Dini because she was implicated in something involving Mossad, the Israeli secret service. Dini, a grey-haired mother with a kindly manner, thought she had no enemies in a “profession that is about helping people” and was amazed when police told her of the plot. “I said to myself that I’m caught between the DGSE and the freemasons and I was only trying to do my job,” she told RTL radio. Detectives quickly established that corporals Pierre B, 28, and Karl E, 25, and part of a cast of shady characters including former police and intelligence officers in the private security world. After rounding up four others in the autumn, late last month the police arrested and charged Daniel B, a retired inspector who had worked in the former domestic police intelligence service, or DCRI, which has evolved to take on duties similar to MI5. Under questioning, the alleged brains behind the amateurish hit squad identified the client in the Dini contract as Jean-Luc AB, a rival business coach who had a grudge against her over her attempts to create a professional association of corporate therapists. Daniel B said that he had offered his services to the coach because they knew one another as members at the masonic lodge in Puteaux, a western suburb on the Seine. The former inspector said that he was part of a “tiny group of freemasons who had turned their hands to carrying out hit contracts”, investigators told the media. A senior member of the masonic lodge called Frédéric V had asked the former inspector to organise the killing on behalf of Jean-Luc AB, police said. A sum of €50,000 was apparently paid. Daniel B put together a team to carry out the contract. He contacted Sébastien L, head of a private security firm, who in turn got in touch with Yannick, a serving police intelligence operative involved in training programmes at the DGSE as well as the internal security service, police sources said. Sébastien L had admitted his role, they said. The former inspector surprised police by admitting to taking part in an entirely separate case, the murder of Laurent Pasquali. The 43-year-old racing driver’s remains were found buried in a wood in the Haute-Loire region in September 2019, nearly a year after he disappeared from his home at Levallois, a suburb on the Seine. No connection had been made between the two cases. Pasquali was known to have links with the underworld. It had initially been suspected that he had vanished to avoid creditors but it turned out that he had been abducted and murdered by the “freemason gang”, investigators said. Daniel B also told police about another contract taken out on a trade union official in the Burgundy region, which he said had not been carried out. “We are at the end of the chain in this case,” a participant in the police inquiry told Le Parisien newspaper. “For money, strong-arm men hijacked a masonic lodge to commit dirty deeds in the form of deadly mutual assistance.” Joseph Cohen-Sabban, a lawyer for Dini, said: “This mind-boggling affair mixes up just about all possible abuses among institutions that are supposed to be irreproachable. It stems from a dark side in our society.” He told another newspaper, Le Figaro: “It’s a terrifying affair involving soldiers who forgot the word scruple and the sense of duty, opportunists out for the smallest banknote, spooks who inhabit the murky waters of private security and a corrupt businessman who used the masonry to settle his professional accounts.” The alleged instigator of the contract had fallen out with Dini because he believed her new professional association for business coaching firms would have excluded his, her lawyer added. Ms Dini had met her alleged would-be murderer several times in 2019 to discuss organising their profession, she said yesterday. “I knew that we didn’t agree. I wouldn’t say he was someone particularly warm and friendly but at no time could I have imagined that things would go to this length. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to the meetings,” she added. Seven men are in custody as the investigation continues. The two soldiers as well as Daniel B, Jean-Luc AB, Sébastien L and Frédéric V are facing preliminary charges of conspiracy to murder. Dini said she was relieved to have escaped an implausible but apparently lethal plot, but added: “It scares me because when you see the number of people involved and that there were other murders, you can wonder about the ramifications and if everyone has really been rounded up.” There was no comment from lawyers of the detained men.