Murder Finding Revives Sex Killings Scandal

A scandal over how French authorites dealt with a mass murder case took a new twist yesterday when it emerged that an investigating gendarme who was thought to have committed suicide was in fact probably murdered.

An autopsy on the exhumed remains of Christian Jambert, who died in 1997, revealed entry wounds caused by two bullets of apparently different types and fired from different angles, the public prosecutor's office in Auxerre confirmed.

"This is a horrifying devel opment," said Didier Seban, the lawyer for Jambert's daughter, Isabelle, who requested the autopsy. "These findings clearly are incompatible with suicide. What needs to be asked now is who killed Christian Jambert, for what reasons, and who tried to cover it up?"

The autopsy results lend new weight to suspicions that investigations into the fate of up to 30 young women who vanished over nearly 30 years in northern Burgundy, south-east of Paris, may have been systematically stifled.

Most of the inquiries were either inexplicably dropped or handled incompetently. Only two have so far been resolved. Many case files have since vanished. Relatives believe that the girls were victims of a high-level sex ring that abducted, raped and murdered more or less at will throughout the 1960s, '70 and '80s, and then ensured that all inquiries came to nothing.

The body of warrant officer Jambert was discovered in August 1997, only weeks before he was due to give evidence to a long-awaited inquiry into the disappearances. In 1979, he was the first officer to link the alleged murders of seven women - who lived with foster families in the Yonne region around Auxerre and vanished between 1977 and 1979 - to the only suspect so far arrested, a retired coach driver called Emile Louis.

Prosecutors, however, said they did not believe Jambert's evidence, shelved his investigation and ignored at least three subsequent requests by the gendarme to have it reopened. Jambert was transferred to a different town in 1989 and it was not until spring 1997, nearly 20 years after his initial accusations, that a full inquiry was finally opened into the Yonne cases.

The public prosecutor in Auxerre at the time, Jacques Cazals, ordered no autopsy into Jambert's death, even though two doctors gave differing reports of the gunshot wounds. No bullet was found, nor was the red pen used to write an apparent suicide note.

"If someone had wanted to cover up a murder they could not have done better," said Mr Seban. Since Jambert's death, the rifle found by his body, part of the prosecutor's report on his alleged suicide, and a folder of relevant documents have vanished, he said.

The lawyer has asked the French justice minister, Dominique Perben, to reopen the inquiry into Jambert's death. Mr Perben said yesterday he would do everything in his power to ensure the case "is properly resolved", and would meet victims' relatives and Jambert's children next week.

Louis, who was recently found guilty of raping his second wife and her daughter and sentenced to 20 years in prison, is to appear in court in Auxerre later this year charged with seven murders. Despite a history of sex offences, he drove the girls - all aged from 16 to 22 and with learning difficulties - to their day-care centres around the region.

Finally arrested in 2000, Louis, 67, confessed to having sex with the victims, then murdering them, and led police to two bodies. He has since retracted his confession and insists the girls were abused, abducted and killed by a ring of high-ranking local men. He was only the chauffeur, he claims.

The current chief prosecutor in Auxerre, Suzanne le Quéau, revealed in late 2001 that the records of most of the criminal investigations shelved in Auxerre between 1958 and 1982 - including 17 cases of missing young women - appeared to have been stolen or destroyed.

She also disclosed that a dozen disturbing post-1982 investigations for which the files still remained - all of them concerning missing young women - had been opened and then suddenly dropped.

In 2002, a former justice minister, Marylise Lebranchu, took disciplinary action against three former Auxerre prosecutors in the case, including Mr Cazals. All were found guilty of serious errors, including "lack of professional honour". France's Council of State overturned the verdict against Mr Cazals last month, allowing him to take a senior post at the Paris appeal court.