May 29, 2008	Thursday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 23, 1429

CHARLEVILLE-MEZIERES (France), May 28: A French court on Wednesday sentenced serial killer Michel Fourniret and his wife to life in prison for the murder of seven girls and young women.

In one of France’s most gruesome cases in recent years, the nine-member jury handed down the heaviest sentence under the country’s criminal law, life imprisonment without possibility of parole, to 66-year-old Fourniret.

His wife Monique Olivier, 59, described by prosecutors as Fourniret’s “bloody muse,” was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 28 years without parole for helping lure his victims.

Dubbed the “Ogre of the Ardennes,” Fourniret showed no emotion as he stood before the presiding judge who read out the verdict at the end of the two-month trial in the northeast town of Charleville-Mezieres.

Dressed in a pink sweater with white blouse, Olivier listened quietly to the judgment as she stood alongside Fourniret in the courtroom’s glass enclosure for defendants.

During the trial, the grey-haired Fourniret admitted to the kidnap, rape and murder of seven girls and young women between 1987 and 2001, at times providing horrific details of the carnage.

Prosecutors argued that Olivier, a former nurse, helped him trap his victims, who were aged between 12 and 22. They were shot, strangled or stabbed to death.

As the verdict was read out, the families of the victims, clutching white roses and pictures of their loved ones, sobbed and hugged, seated in the first row of the public gallery.

“I can breathe again,” said Marie-Jeanne Laville, the mother of 17-year-old Isabelle who was kidnapped on her way home from school in 1987, raped and killed.

Laville said she was “very satisfied” with the verdict.

“We will now try to return to a nearly normal life,” said Jean-Pierre Leroy, whose 20-year-old daughter Fabienne was nabbed from a supermarket car park in 1988 and killed by a shotgun wound to the chest.

Fourniret’s lawyer has said his client would not appeal the decision.

Olivier, charged in the murder of one of the young women and complicity in several others, was finally convicted of complicity in four murders and in one rape. Her lawyer said she may appeal.

During the trial, the jury heard Fourniret, a former machine operator, admit that he had a sexual obsession with virgins and describe being in an “altered state” when killing his victims.

“I remain an extremely dangerous individual,” he acknowledged.

Lawyers for Olivier sought to portray their client as the terrorised wife of a domineering and violent husband.

But state prosecutor Xavier Lenoir described her as a willing accomplice, saying she displayed a “deafening silence” to the screams of girls being raped by her husband.—AFP