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Corrupt police officers ‘taking a cut’ arrested in Marseille

Twelve police officers were arrested Tuesday on suspicion of corruption in the southern French city of Marseilles, the latest in a series of cases to tarnish the image of French law enforcement.

Corrupt police officers 'taking a cut' arrested in Marseille
Photo: Flickr user .v1ctor.

The officers came from a special anti-crime squad and were being kept in custody, prosecutor Jacques Dallest said.

The 12 were arrested as part of an investigation into organised theft, extortion, violence and drugs, police spokesman Pascal Garibian said.

They are suspected of having stolen drugs and cash from dealers and taking cigarettes from illicit sellers.

"A few of them, apparently, were helping themselves and taking a cut," said Dallest, adding that the probe would gather more details of a practice that had been "spread across this service for a while."

Marseille prosecutors first opened a probe into the specialist squad at the start of the year after internal complaints.

In early September, a special committee on crime in Marseille, headed by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, looked at crime in France's second-largest city. 

The arrests are the latest in a series of incidents bringing French law enforcement under scrutiny.

In 2011, the deputy police chief of Lyon, Michel Neyret, was arrested after he was accused of accepting gifts and favours from members of the Lyon underworld.

He was charged in October 2011 with corruption, influence peddling, drug trafficking, and associating with criminals.

A former magistrate from Lyon, serving with prosecutors in Cayenne in French Guiana, was last month indicted for alleged corruption.

And in mid-September, seven Lyon police officers were accused of "passive corruption" where they allegedly traded favours with a drug-trafficking family.

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POLICE

Denmark convicts man over bomb joke at airport

A Danish court on Thursday gave a two-month suspended prison sentence to a 31-year-old Swede for making a joke about a bomb at Copenhagen's airport this summer.

Denmark convicts man over bomb joke at airport

In late July, Pontus Wiklund, a handball coach who was accompanying his team to an international competition, said when asked by an airport agent that
a bag of balls he was checking in contained a bomb.

“We think you must have realised that it is more than likely that if you say the word ‘bomb’ in response to what you have in your bag, it will be perceived as a threat,” the judge told Wiklund, according to broadcaster TV2, which was present at the hearing.

The airport terminal was temporarily evacuated, and the coach arrested. He later apologised on his club’s website.

“I completely lost my judgement for a short time and made a joke about something you really shouldn’t joke about, especially in that place,” he said in a statement.

According to the public prosecutor, the fact that Wiklund was joking, as his lawyer noted, did not constitute a mitigating circumstance.

“This is not something we regard with humour in the Danish legal system,” prosecutor Christian Brynning Petersen told the court.

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