Djel Sannes

Sannes stands tall, his dark hair kept in a close crop above bright, alert eyes. The Military Police uniform is his usual dress; during his captivity under Hange and Levi he instead wears a white button-up shirt with black trousers and white shoes.

Loyalty to the crown defines Sannes to the point of fanaticism. Murder and torture are, in his mind, the price of peace inside the Walls, and he credits the First Interior Squad's quiet killings with a century of stability the public ought to be thankful for. He shares the typical Military Police contempt for the Survey Corps, dismissing its soldiers as a waste of taxes.

For all his conviction, he is careless. The cover story built around Minister Nick's death fell apart on obvious details: torture marks on the body, torn skin across his own knuckles, and a robbery motive that made no sense for a victim posing as a penniless craftsman. He also confesses to genuine cruelty, admitting he enjoyed hurting the helpless because the cause made it feel righteous. Under prolonged torture that certainty collapses into guilt; weeping, he invites his captors to hurt him without holding back and asks to be tortured to death as compensation for everything he inflicted on others.

Sannes enlisted in the Military Police out of devotion to the king and was folded into the First Interior Squad, whose real work was making inconvenient citizens disappear. He seized and killed the father of a boy named Erwin Smith over a forbidden theory, gunned down Armin Arlert's parents for attempting to fly past the Walls in a balloon, and once traded pleasantries with the serial killer Kenny Ackerman at a royal address, unbothered by the man's body count so long as he now served the crown. He was also present when Kenny's unit executed Alma, Rod Reiss's mistress, sparing young Historia only after Rod intervened.

When word spreads that Minister Nick has leaked church secrets to the Survey Corps, Sannes and his partner Ralph beat the clergyman to death without extracting a word, then dress the scene as a burglary. Hange Zoë probes the story and Sannes stonewalls the investigation, but soon afterward the pair are snatched off the road by Hange and Levi. Strapped to a chair, he endures pulled nails and broken fingers while insisting the squad's brutality preserved humanity's peace, refusing to surrender what he knows about the Reiss family.

His interrogators break him with theater rather than pain. Left alone, Sannes overhears what sounds like Ralph casually selling out their secrets and mocking him; convinced his friend has already talked, he tells his captors everything, including that the Reiss family is the true royal line. Only later, sharing a cell with Ralph, does he learn the voice was reading from a script and that he alone betrayed the king. He parts with Hange on a strange note of respect, warning that someone will always appear to do the regime's dirty work, and after the coup he sits in prison, healed and oddly at peace. Years later, watching soldiers conspire against the military, Hange remembers that warning.