Father Jean-Pierre Schumacher, the last survivor of the massacre of the Algerian Trappist monastery of Tibhirine in 1996, died Sunday, November 21 in a monastery in central Morocco, we learned from an official of the Christian Church in Morocco.
” He [Jean-Pierre Schumacher] died this morning in serenity at the monastery of Our Lady of the Atlas, in Midelt. He is a simple and fraternal man who knew that his mission was to bear witness to what he lived in Tibhirine ”Father Daniel Nourissat, vicar of Saint-Pierre Cathedral in Rabat, told AFP.
Jean-Pierre Schumacher, 97, was the last survivor of the mutiny perpetrated against seven Trappist monks from the Tibhirine monastery, kidnapped and murdered in 1996 during the civil war in Algeria.
“A call from God to witness”
The circumstances of this massacre have still not been clarified. Only their decapitated heads had been found on a road, two months after the kidnapping.
The official thesis put forward at the time by Algiers described an abduction and then an assassination, claimed by Islamists from the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in the midst of the civil war, but doubts remain about the possible involvement of the Algerian military secret services.
Four years after the tragedy, Jean-Pierre Schumacher moved to Morocco where he became the prior of a small community of Trappist monks of the Cistercian Order in the Moroccan Atlas. “He often said that his survival was a call from God to witness, something he did all his life”, says Mr. Nourissat.
Another survivor of the tragedy, Father Amédée Noto, died in 2008. Monk Jean-Pierre will be buried in Midelt on Tuesday, according to Father Nourissat.
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