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CRIME

Father jailed for killing baby son

A 22-year-old man was sentenced on Wednesday by a criminal court in Evry to 12 years in prison for savagely beating his five-month-old baby boy to death.

The man’s wife was also sentenced to a suspended three-year jail term for her failure to intervene to protect the infant.

“The baby ended up dying as a result of the violence of his father and the indifference of his mother,” the prosecutor in the case said, according to a French-language report from  AFP.

The sentence comes more than three years after the child died.

On November 10th 2009, a couple of friends of the mother came to visit her and her husband at the hotel room where they lived in Evry, a suburb south of Paris.

In a bedroom they discovered the baby, inert and covered in bruises.

They sought explanations in vain from the parents and later alerted police who arrived only to find that the baby was dead.

An autopsy showed the baby had suffered from traumatic brain injuries and burst eardrums.

The baby’s face was covered in bruises.

An archived report from Le Parisien showed the father, who had repeatedly been in trouble with the law in his youth, had beaten the child whenever it cried.

He acknowledged giving the baby a “great slap” three days before he died.

Despite the baby’s signs of tiredness and loss of appetite, the parents failed to seek medical help.

“It was an appalling thing that occurred behind closed doors in this hotel room,” the prosecutor said, according to the AFP report.

The infant suffered “a slow agony in the presence of his two parents, who were supposed to be protecting him”.
 

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CRIME

France blocks fake Ukraine war recruitment website

French authorities have uncovered a website for a fake recruitment drive purportedly seeking French volunteers to fight for Ukraine against the Russian invasion, the defence ministry said on Thursday.

France blocks fake Ukraine war recruitment website

The site has now been taken down by French services, a government source, who asked not to be named, told AFP without elaborating.

The site had said that 200,000 French people were invited to “enlist in Ukraine”, with immigrants given priority.

A link to the site – that resembled the French army’s genuine recruitment portal – had been posted on X, formerly Twitter, the French defence ministry said.

“The site is a fake government site,” the ministry said, also on X, “and has been reposted by malevolent accounts as part of a disinformation campaign”.

The ministry did not say who they thought might be responsible. But a source close to the government told AFP initial evidence pointed to communications operations linked to Russian mercenary group Wagner.

“The accounts used and the technical data behind them, these are the people we know”, the source said.

“These people are still there and remain very focused on Ukraine. The subject of the French army is something that annoys them a lot.”

Separately, a government official speaking on condition of anonymity said the site bore “the hallmarks of a Russian or pro-Russian effort as part of a disinformation campaign claiming that the French army is preparing to send troops to Ukraine”.

French President Emmanuel Macron angered the Russian leadership last month by hardening his tone on the conflict sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In recent weeks he has refused to rule out sending ground troops and insisted that Europe has to do all that is necessary for a Russian defeat.

France has already accused Russia of waging a disinformation campaign against it.

The official told AFP that similar recent examples of disinformation posts included pictures of French army convoys wrongly presented as moving towards the Ukrainian border.

The fake website invited potential recruits to contact “unit commander Paul” for information about joining.

The defence ministry and government cyber units are investigating, ministry staff told AFP.

The French government has recently stepped up efforts to denounce and fight what it says are Russian disinformation and destabilisation campaigns aimed at undermining French public support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.

“Russia is asserting itself as the most aggressive player in the information field,” Marc-Antoine Brillant, the head of Viginum, an agency mandated to detect digital disinformation campaigns, said in an interview with French daily Le Figaro.

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