Former world champion fined for biting French police
A French court on Tuesday ordered former athletics world champion
Eunice Barber to pay a 5,000-euro (6,300-dollar) fine for insulting and
biting a police officer and resisting arrest.
But the 34-year-old Sierra Leone-born athlete denounced the verdict
as "worse than injustice" after the hearing near Paris, insisting she
was the victim of police brutality.
"I am guilty of nothing at all," Barber, who won heptathlon and long
jump world titles for France in 1999 and 2003, said after the hearing,
vowing to appeal. "They (the police) know what they did."
The athlete claims that two years ago she was slapped on the face
after she opened her car window to talk to an officer who stopped her
when she turned down a street that was closed to traffic in the suburb
of Saint Denis.
The officer denied the accusation.
Six officers wrestled her to the ground to handcuff her, in a
struggle that was caught on amateur video and posted on the Internet.
Barber says the police described her as a "cannibal" as they brought
her in to the station, where she spent 28 hours in custody.
Vittorio de Filippis of the left-wing Liberation newspaper said he
was handcuffed, strip-searched twice and questioned without a lawyer
present after officers turned up at his house before dawn and took him
in to a police station.
President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday said he understood the "emotion"
sparked by the newsman's arrest and said he was setting up a commission
charged with making arrest procedures "more respectful of rights and
individual dignity."
BOBIGNY, France, AFP
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