French court drops Africa arms probe

A French court has dropped its investigation into allegations that the son of the late President Francois Mitterrand was involved in illegal arms sales to Angola, BBC has reported. Jean-Christophe Mitterrand had been suspected of acting as an intermediary for arms deals with African heads of state, and of receiving huge cash payments from an arms dealer. According to the report, the court said that a legal technicality in the way the arms-trafficking charges had been brought meant that magistrates could not pursue the charges against Mitterrand or the two other men implicated in the case any further. However, it left the way open for charges of fraud and abuse of power to be brought in the future. Mitterrand, who served as his father’s African adviser for six years, was accused of helping channel arms worth US $500 million to Angola via French arms company Brenco International. He allegedly received a payment in 1997 of US $1.8 million into a Swiss bank account from Brenco. He said the payment was not linked to arms and his links to Pierre Falcone, the head of Brenco still in jail on charges relating to arms deals around the world, were entirely innocent, the report said. Mitterrand had also been accused of using his influence to arrange loans to pay for the arms at the height of Angola’s civil war. He was arrested late last year but released on bail in early January when his mother, Danielle Mitterrand, paid five million francs bail. After his release, he told French television that the judges held a personal vendetta against him and his family, according to the BBC report. “How can you not see that. When a judge sweats with hatred every time he opens his mouth, how can you not see that you are being sent to the Bastille,” he was quoted as saying. The Angola-gate case as it has come to be known, is one of a number of high-profile scandals which have emerged from the Mitterrand era.