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Amnesty accuses

French police of

rights abuse

PARIS: Amnesty International accused French police on Thursday of continued ill-treatment, shootings and killings and said there were long delays in acting against suspect officers.

Herve Berger, deputy general secretary of the human rights watchdog, said he met French Justice Minister Jacques Toubon this week but the ministers of the interior and defence, who is responsible for the paramilitary gendarmerie police, had sent representatives.

"There is a desire for dialogue. The door to the justice ministry is open, but that to interior and defence (ministries) is ajar," Berger told a news conference in Paris.

Amnesty said later in a statement dialogue had been satisfying and should continue. It said it was told of plans to improve French justice procedures and police training.

Berger said Amnesty raised concern that a pattern of ill-treatment, shootings and killings, particularly of non-Europeans and juveniles as highlighted in an October 1994 report, was continuing.

David Braham, the report's author, said: "In 1994, we quoted 29 cases of judicial delays, 11 of which were for incidents involving firearms and the rest for beatings and ill-treatment. Of these 29, more than half are still under investigation three years later."

Braham said cases under Amnesty study included the shooting dead of Algerian-born Khaled Kelkal, leader of an Islamic guerrilla network killed after a manhunt last September.

His death sparked controversy over whether police could have captured him alive rather than shooting him dead when he pulled out a pistol and fired several shots at them while he was surrounded.

Braham said it took the French courts more than five years to sentence a policeman for beating up a Senegalese boxer and two years to sentence another policeman for raping a Tunisian woman detained at the border with Italy.

Other incidents included the killing of Todor Bogdanovic, an eight-year-old gypsy boy from Serbia, who died when police fired at his family's car as it crossed the French border at night in a mountain area favoured by illegal immigrants.

Marseille transport police were alleged to have beaten up Franco-Algerian Sid Ahmed Amiri, forcing him into a metal container and shooting at it before abandoning him.

Last September, 16 trade unionists were arrested and allegedly ill-treated by gendarmes in Tahiti after protests against French nuclear tests in the South Pacific.

The policemen were seeking people involved in the ransacking of Tahiti airport in which several gendarmes were injured.-Reuter