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Briton gets 30 years for French jogger’s murder

A British man was sentenced to 30 years in prison by a French court on Friday for the horrific 2013 murder of a young mother out jogging.

Published: 29 April 2017 10:14 CEST

Briton gets 30 years for French jogger's murder

A police vehicle arriving on April 27th at the Nîmes court house before the trial of British national Robert Plant. Photo: Sylvain Thomas/AFP

The court in the southern city of Nîmes also ruled that 36-year-old Robert Plant should not be eligible for parole for 20 years.

Plant was formally charged in 2013 for the murder of 34-year-old Jouda Zammit, whose partially clothed body was found on January 24 of that year. She went missing after going jogging.

Her throat had been slit and her body and face disfigured with stones and a cutter.

Plant lived with his mother just yards from where the woman's body was found.

Nimes prosecutor Stephane Bertrand had sought a life term for Plant, dismissing arguments that he “had lost contact with reality” on the day of the murder.

Plant had been described by neighbours as “peaceful” but Bertrand described him as a “pervert” and “not a madman” who had “committed a particularly brutal crime.”

The victim had three children who are now aged 14, 11 and seven.

French police search for gunmen after shootings in Paris suburb

Two men were shot dead near a cultural centre in the Seine-Saint-Denis suburb, to the northeast of the French capital on Sunday evening, less than 48 hours after another fatal shooting nearby, according to authorities.

The victims of Sunday’s shooting were aged 35 and 31 and known for violence and drug trafficking, according to police sources.

One was shot in the head, with two suspects fleeing on foot, leaving the magazine of an automatic weapon and 18 spent bullet casings behind them.

The second man was hit six times.

The town of 52,000 people was on edge, mayor Stephane Blanchet told AFP, saying people were living in fear of another shooting.

“There is a huge feeling of fear, that it could start again and [that someone could be hit by] a stray bullet,” Blanchet said.

“If it had been a beautiful sunny day, there would have been more people outside,” when the latest shooting happened, he said.

In the first shooting, a 28-year-old man was killed on a nearby housing estate early on Saturday, with three others wounded.

In March, French President Emmanuel Macron announced an ‘XXL’ cleanup of drug trafficking in the southern port city of Marseille and other towns across France, including Sevran, where the drugs trade has been blamed for a spate of death and violence.

One drug dealing hotspot in Sevran was ‘eradicated’ in that operation, police said.

“We are aware that when we do that, we destabilise traffic, we create greed and sometimes there are clashes,” Paris police chief Laurent Nunez said on Sunday.

“But we will still continue,” he added.

Local La France insoumise MP Clementine Autain accused the government of abandoning some areas, and said the suburb, “did not have the police presence of other areas”.

Drug-related violence has often flared in Sevran – considered a hub of drug trafficking in France – with the then-mayor calling for UN peacekeepers to be deployed there in 2011.

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