Former France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy served 20 days in prison last year after a lower court found him guilty of criminal conspiracy – Copyright AFP Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD<\/p>\n
France\u2019s ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy at an appeals trial Tuesday said he was \u201cinnocent\u201d, rejecting charges he had sought Libyan financing for his 2007 election in exchange for helping improve Tripoli\u2019s image after deadly bombings.<\/p>\n
A lower court in September found the right-wing politician, who was president from 2007 to 2012, guilty of seeking to acquire funding from Muammar Gaddafi\u2019s Libya for the campaign that saw him elected and sentenced him to five years behind bars.<\/p>\n
The case saw Sarkozy, who has always denied any wrongdoing, become\u00a0modern France\u2019s first president to have gone to jail. He served 20 days before he was released pending the appeal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the initial trial, prosecutors had argued Sarkozy\u2019s aides, acting in his name, struck a deal with Gaddafi, promising in return to help restore the Libyan leader\u2019s international image after Tripoli was blamed for two airplane bombings.<\/p>\n
The West laid the blame on Libya for the bombing of the Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie in Scotland \u2014 which killed 259 people \u2014 and of the UTA Flight 772 over Niger the following year, which took the lives of 170 people.<\/p>\n
Relatives of those killed in the 1989 spoke of their ordeal at the appeal trial last week.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can only respond to such indescribable suffering with truth,\u201d Sarkozy said on the first of several days of taking the stand, with his wife, model and singer Carla Bruni, in the courtroom.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut you cannot repair suffering with an injustice: I am innocent,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The lower court found Sarkozy guilty of criminal conspiracy over what it said was a scheme to acquire Libyan funding, but not of receiving or using the funds for the campaign.<\/p>\n
The appeal trial is set to run until June 3, with a verdict expected in the fall. If convicted, Sarkozy faces up to 10 years in prison.<\/p>\n
Sarkozy has faced a series of legal issues since leaving office and has already received two definitive convictions in other cases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy served 20 days in prison last year after a lower court found him…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[121,5,3161,332],"class_list":{"0":"post-3198","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-crime","9":"tag-france","10":"tag-sarkozy","11":"tag-trial"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}