TOULON – A French lecturer at a war college has been sacked for claiming in a book that the United States and Israel were behind the September 11, 2001 attacks, the defence minister said Thursday.

Aymeric Chauprade outlined his conspiracy theory in "Chronicle of the Clash of Civilisations", a 248-page book alleging that a bomb explosion brought down the World Trade Center towers and not terrorist kamikaze planes.

Defence Minister Herve Morin said Chauprade "was seeking to prove that there was an Israeli-American plot" behind the September 11 attacks.

"This man has no place in an institution like ours and I therefore decided last night that he should not set foot there ever again," Morin told AFP during a visit of an aircraft carrier off the coast of Toulon in southern France.

Chauprade taught geopolitics at the CID military college in Paris.

The online edition of Le Point magazine, which published a report on Chauprade’s book this week, said hundreds of French officers and foreign senior military officials had taken his classes.

[AFP / Expatica]