Police questioned yesterday a French politician who sparked fury when he alleged that a former minister molested boys at a Moroccan orgy and that senior figures covered it up, officials said.
Luc Ferry, a celebrity philosopher and former education minister, claimed this week in a televised debate that he had heard about the scandal from “a Prime Minister” during his own time in office between 2002 and 2004. Prosecutors responded by opening an investigation on Wednesday. Sources close to the probe said that police in the child protection brigade questioned Mr Ferry as a witness at their headquarters yesterday morning.
In the debate Mr Ferry said he had been told about a former minister, whom he did not name, who was said to have been arrested in Marrakesh on suspicion of paedophilia but flown back to France in secret while the report was hushed up.
Minister charged
Mali’s former health minister Ibrahim Oumar Toure has been charged with the “crime of abuse of public funds” intended for the fight against AIDS and placed under police watch, officials said yesterday.
Mr Toure “has been charged in the affair of the Global Fund (set up by the United Nations mainly to fight AIDS) for crimes of undermining the public good, embezzling public funds, fraud and using forged documents, favouritism and complicity in favouritism,” said an official statement sent to AFP.
This affair concerns “several billion CFA francs” (millions of dollars or euros) placed at Mali’s disposal by the United Nations to combat AIDS in the poor west African country on the southern edge of the Sahara, it added.
Dead dolphins find
Animal activists expressed outrage yesterday at the discovery of two dead snub fin dolphins tied to mangroves and weighted with a concrete slab, saying every death took the rare species nearer to extinction.
The dolphins were found in wetlands in Australia’s world-famous Great Barrier Reef region last week by a recreational fisherman. Police said they suspected they were caught in a net cast by illegal fishing crews.
“The killing and concealing of these two dolphins is totally reprehensible and completely out of line with what the community expects,” the World Wildlife Fund’s Richard Leck told national radio.
Authorities are seeking leads on the animals, which they suspect could have been accidentally caught in nets but then dumped among the mangroves to hide the killings, which fishing boat operators are required to report.
Slumdog millionaire
An illiterate, slum-dwelling Philippine carpenter who was too poor to send his six children to school became an instant millionaire with the country’s second biggest-ever lottery win on Thursday.
The 60-year-old collected 356.5-million-peso (eight million dollars) from a single 20-peso ticket, which was all he could afford, said an aide to Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office general manager Jose Ferdinand Roxas.
“He plans to buy a house because he and his family had never owned a proper home all their lives,” said the Roxas aide, who declined to be identified.
Drugs in statues
Italian and US police said yesterday they have made 66 arrests in a two-year investigation against drug smugglers who hid large amounts of cocaine in crates of chalk statues sent to Rome’s Fiumicino airport.
The cocaine was smuggled to Fiumicino from Colombia through the Dominican Republic and payments were then laundered through various countries including Germany and Libya, ending up ultimately in Boston in the United States.
The Italian side of the operation was led by the owner of a clothes shop in Rome with no previous convictions, who handled contacts with Colombia.
The finances were handled by five Lebanese nationals, who are on the run.
Israeli tycoon dies
Israeli businessman Sammy Ofer, whose company Ofer Brothers is embroiled in a scandal over illegal trade with Iran, died at his Tel Aviv home yesterday, a corporate spokesman said. He was 89.
Mr Ofer, a shipping magnate who was one of the founders of the Ofer Brothers Group, died early yesterday after “a difficult period of illness,” spokesman Motti Scherf said. Press reports suggested he was in the advanced stages of cancer.