Noriega, Manuel - French Court Sentences former...
French Court Sentences Noriega to 7 Years
By David Jolly
July 7, 2010
PARIS — The former Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega was convicted Wednesday of money laundering and sentenced by a French judge to seven years in prison.
Mr. Noriega, 76, was found guilty by the 11th chamber of the Tribunal Correctionnel de Paris, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office said. The tribunal ordered Mr. Noriega to forfeit about $2.9 million that had been frozen in his French bank accounts.
The prosecutor in the case, Michel Maes, had sought a 10-year prison term.
In 1999, Mr. Noriega was convicted in absentia of laundering $3 million in illicit funds for the Medellín drug cartel through international banks and into French accounts. The conviction Wednesday came as he was retried on the same charge after his April extradition to France from Miami, where he had been held after serving 15 years of a 30-year sentence in the United States. Olivier Metzner, a lawyer for Mr. Noriega, declined to comment on Wednesday. Mr. Noriega’s lawyers have argued that because of ill health, he is likely to die behind bars if given a long sentence. The defense has 10 days to appeal.
But Antonin Levy, another lawyer for Mr. Noriega, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying that the 32 months that Mr. Noriega spent waiting for extradition in Miami would count toward his French sentence, meaning he could be up for parole within a year.
He is still sought in Panama in connection with the 1985 assassination of Hugo Spadafora, an opponent of his government.
Like the United States — Mr. Noriega had worked with the C.I.A. and provided intelligence to other American agencies, his former aide-de-camp testified in the early 1990s — France once had a close relationship with the strongman: he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur in 1987 by President François Mitterrand.
But Mr. Noriega fell out of favor with Washington in the 1980s and was indicted on federal drug charges. On Dec. 20, 1989, the United States military invaded Panama to topple Mr. Noriega’s government and capture him for trial in the United States. After seeking refuge in the Vatican Embassy, Mr. Noriega surrendered in January 1990.
He was convicted by a Miami jury in April 1992 on charges of cocaine trafficking, racketeering and money laundering, the first time an American jury had convicted a foreign head of state of criminal charges.