Fernando Pereira

On the twentieth anniversary of the sinking, it was revealed that the French president François Mitterrand had personally authorized the bombing. Admiral Pierre Lacoste made a statement saying Pereira's death weighed heavily on his conscience. Also on that anniversary, Television New Zealand sought to access a video record made at the preliminary hearing where the two agents pleaded guilty. The footage has remained sealed on the court record since shortly after the conclusion of the criminal proceedings. The two agents oppose release of the footage – despite having both written books themselves on the incident – and have taken the case to the New Zealand Court of Appeal and, subsequently, the Supreme Court of New Zealand.

In 2006, Antoine Royal, brother of the French presidential candidate Segolene Royal, revealed in an interview that their brother, Gérard Royal, a former French intelligence officer, had been the agent who put the bombs on the Rainbow Warrior.

Fernando's daughter Marelle, who was aged eight at the time of his death, appealed in 1995 through the French newspaper Libération to anybody who was involved in the bombing operation to tell her fully what had happened. "Now I am 18, I am an adult and I think by now I have the right to know exactly what events transpired surrounding the explosion which cost my father his life", she wrote. She also travelled to New Zealand to interview former Prime Minister David Lange and Greenpeace campaigners who sailed on the Rainbow Warrior.

The Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior lay moored at Auckland's Marsden Wharf on Wednesday, 10 July 1985. It had arrived in New Zealand from Vanuatu three days earlier – a week after President Haruo Remeliik had been assassinated in Palau. Greenpeace campaigners were preparing the former North Sea fishing trawler for the environmental group's biggest-ever protest voyage to Mururoa, one which they hoped would alert the world over France's nuclear testing and radioactive poisoning of the oceans. On board, supporters celebrated the 29th birthday of Steve Sawyer, the American co-ordinator of the Pacific Peace Voyage.

Fernando Pereira (10 May 1950 – 10 July 1985) was a freelance Dutch photographer, of Portuguese origin, who drowned when French intelligence (DGSE) detonated a bomb and sank the Rainbow Warrior, owned by the environmental organisation Greenpeace on 10 July 1985.