Paris - In a highly controversial verdict, a special court yesterday acquitted two former French ministers of manslaughter in an AIDS-tainted blood scandal of the mid-1980s, but found a third former minister guilty.
Mr Laurent Fabius, a high-flying Socialist who is currently speaker of parliament and was prime minister from 1986 to 1988, was cleared in the case, as was Mrs Georgina Dufoix (56), his former social affairs minister.
But in its maiden ruling the court found the health minister of the time, Edmond Herve, guilty of manslaughter and endangering lives in the cases of two individuals infected with HIV-contaminated blood due to alleged negligence by the government.
It ruled, however, that he would not be sentenced as he had already endured 15 years of criticism in which "he was not presumed innocent and was submitted before his trial to appraisals that were often excessive," said the Court of Justice of the Republic.
The ruling in the hushed courtroom raised an immediate chorus of outrage from victims and relatives while Herve himself protested against what he termed a "halfway . . . politically biased" judgement.
Some 4,500 people were infected through transfusions and use of contaminated blood products between 1984 and 1986, and more than 1,000 have since died of AIDS.