fears are serious. The Committee has also stressed that “for article 3 of the Convention to apply, the individual concerned must face a foreseeable and real risk of being subjected to torture in the country to which he/she is being returned, and that this danger must be personal and present”b and that invoking a general situation or certain specific cases is not sufficient. According to the State party, while the complainant describes himself as a fighter pilot and an officer of the Algerian Armed Forces who has deserted for humanitarian reasons, he provides no proof. To establish that he is a deserter he has merely presented the Committee with two telegrams from the Algerian Air Force addressed to his family home; both are extremely succinct and merely request him “to present himself to the Air Force authorities in Béchar for a matter concerning him”, without further details or any mention of his rank or former rank. In the State party’s view it is very difficult to believe that the complainant was unable to produce any other document to substantiate the fears he expressed. 8.4 Secondly, even if the complainant did establish that he was a fighter pilot and a deserter, his account contains various contradictions and implausibilities that discredit the fears invoked. In particular, he maintains that in early March, when along with another pilot he refused to participate in bombing operations against the civilian population, he knew that he risked heavy penalties by refusing to obey orders; he points out that such penalties were more severe for officers and, given the situation in Algeria, would have been handed down in time of war and included the death penalty. While the other pilot had been shot on the spot for disobeying orders, the complainant had apparently been released after only three months in prison for the same conduct, his only punishment, once he had been cleared of suspected Islamist sympathies, being that he was forbidden to fly and assigned to the airbase. When he deserted from the airbase and fled to his family’s village, an attempt was supposedly made to kill the complainant with a submachine gun fired from an intelligence vehicle: his neighbour was killed on the spot while he himself - the sole target - escaped once again. 8.5 The State party considers that the complainant’s personal conduct renders his claims implausible. While he claims to have deserted in 1994 on humanitarian grounds as a conscientious objector, consciously exposing himself to the risk of very severe punishment, his humanitarian concerns seem totally at odds with his violent criminal conduct on arrival in France and subsequently. Scarcely a year after supposedly deserting on grounds of conscientious objection, the complainant perpetrated a common crime of particular gravity, namely, aggravated rape with the added threat of a weapon, and while in prison for that crime showed he was a continuing danger to society by making two violent attempts to escape. 8.6 In any case, the State party maintains that the complainant’s alleged fears cannot be held to represent a serious danger of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment within the meaning of article 3 of the Convention. The complainant maintained that he faced two kinds of danger in the event of being sent back to Algeria: one, the result of his desertion, consisting in the punishment laid down in the Algerian military criminal code for such cases; the other related to the possibility that he might in the future again be accused of Islamist sympathies. The State party considers that the danger of imprisonment and other criminal penalties for desertion does not in itself establish a violation of article 3 of the Convention since these are the legal punishments for an ordinary offence in the estimation of most States parties to the Convention. It is important to note that, although the complainant maintains that punishment in the event of desertion may in extreme cases extend to the death penalty, he does not claim that he himself would incur that penalty. In fact, according to the State party, he could not: it emerges from his own account that his desertion was an individual act, unrelated to combat operations, after he had 133