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| Europe |
| France's 'Watergate' trial opens |
| 2004-11-16 |
| In France, 12 people have gone on trial for running a phone-tapping operation used by the late President Francois Mitterrand to monitor his opponents. The defendants were almost all civil servants and they include current Renault chief Louis Schweitzer. The case has taken 22 years to come to court, because of state secrecy orders that prevented the judge gaining access to key documents. It has been described as France's own Watergate scandal... The late French president set up a specialist anti-terrorist unit, after the 1982 bombing of a Jewish area in central Paris. Somehow, the unit turned into a massive private eavesdropping exercise, taping thousands of hours of conversations. It reported directly to the president, by-passing the French intelligence services. Journalists, lawyers, businessmen and even the actress and model Carole Bouquet were among those whose private phone conversations were tapped over long periods of time. Most of the 12 defendants in this three-month trial will argue that they were only carrying out orders from above. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |