Jacques Chirac the French President is pressing the case for Guy Verhofstadt the Belgian Prime Minister

Jacques Chirac, the French President, is pressing the case for Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian Prime Minister. Britain is backing Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, to succeed Romano Prodi as president of the European Commission this autumn but the move faces opposition from France. Blandine Lejeune, lawyer for Father Wiel, said the investigation had been convinced that “children cannot lie”.. Defence lawyers suggested from the beginning that Dimitri and the other children were lying to spread the guilt beyond their own parents.Mme Delay and her son spoke of orgies of child sex in a house over the border in Belgium. Police investigations revealed nothing.Defence lawyers demanded to know why a series of expert psychologists had declared the evidence of the children and Mme Delay to be “credible”, despite many factual discrepancies. Mme Delay said a small Moroccan girl had been brought to the house, murdered and buried in the garden.

Mme Delay and then Mme Grenon confirmed these accusations but their husbands always denied them. Mme Delay’s oldest son, Dimitri, now 12, named a string of other attackers, including neighbours but also people who claimed that they had never heard of the two families. Her neighbour, Aur?e Grenon, then withdrew her identical accusations.One of the accused, Alain Mar?ux, a court bailiff and property lawyer, 44, shouted: “I’ve lost everything They stole my children Killed my mother.” Several of those cleared, including M Mar?ux, had spent two and a half years in jail One accused man had committed suicide. After ignoring sexually assaulted children for too long, the newspaper said, France’s judicial system had over-compensated by treating all accusations by children as “sacred”.It now appears that the assaults on children in a council block in Outreau, a suburb of Boulogne, were confined to sexual acts between Mme Delay and Mme Grenon and their husbands and their six children.Many mysteries remain, however. The children of what now appear to be wholly innocent people have been placed in care (one of whom tried to commit suicide at the start of the trial).”This is a judicial Chernobyl.. a surrealist folly,” said Ma?e Hubert Delarue, lawyer for M Mar?ux. Two others, including the priest, Father Dominique Wiel, had been on hunger strike in prison to protest their innocence Marriages have broken up Jobs had been lost. “Innocent men and women have been allowed to rot in jail, in a state of despair.” Le Monde described the four-year investigation and trial as a “voyage into the country of judicial horrors”.

Karine, you did nothing …” One by one she exculpated the other defendants, who had been accused by herself and her four children of being involved in an elaborate child-prostitution ring, including among other things forcing children to perform sexual acts with dogs. The Russian media is portraying the battle as a David versus Goliath struggle.Ms Tumasova says she is determined not to give up: “We have a damp climate here so ordinary people need somewhere to dry their laundry.”. The hostesses who hand you a newspaper or a glass of sherry on the AVE high-speed train between Madrid and Seville have won their 12-year campaign to wear trousers at work. The women hated the uniform, not only for aesthetic reasons but because it wasn’t practical.