13 February 2007
The French war criminal Maurice Papon, 96, convicted for his role in the deportation of French Jews from Vichy France to the Nazi death camps, has been hospitalized with heart failure, his lawyer said on Monday. He was admitted to hospital late Thursday in Paris for a heart operation described by his lawyer Francis Vuillemin as "worrying for a man approaching 97 years of age". A senior official under the wartime Vichy government, Papon was sentenced to ten years in jail in 1998 for his role in organizing the deportation of some 1,500 Jews to Nazi Germany, where most of them died in extermination camps. In the 1960s, Papon was a French government minister.
During his trial, Papon walked free pending an appeal and briefly fled to Switzerland before being incarcerated in 1999. Receiving a pacemaker implant in 2000, Papon appealed three times to French president Jacques Chirac for clemency on health grounds, but his requests were denied. He was finally released in September 2002 after a Paris court ruled he was too ill to serve his time. His lawyers vowed to seek a re-trial but an appeals court made his conviction definitive in June 2004.
