Report accuses France over BSE

French authorities usually blame Britain and the European Commission for the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and its human variant, Creutzfeldt Jakob disease.

But a damning report released by a Senate commission of inquiry yesterday criticised French governments since 1993 - and especially their agriculture ministers - for incompetence in dealing with the crisis.

"The Ministry of Agriculture constantly tried to prevent or delay the enforcement of precautionary measures which later proved to be in the interest of food safety on the grounds they had no scientific basis," the commission says.

In 1994, the French Agriculture Ministry claimed that BSE could not be transmitted to humans, despite early evidence to the contrary. The Ministry resisted pressure to ban the use of offal in animal feed until 1996 - a step taken by Britain in 1990.

To avoid harming the French agricultural industry, the Ministry also delayed the precaution of super-heating animal feed. And contrary to advice from the Health Ministry in 1999, the present Agriculture Minister, Mr Jean Glavany, did not ban all use of meat and bone meal until last autumn.

The Health Ministry was repeatedly at odds with the Agriculture Ministry over the BSE crisis, and experience has shown that the Health Ministry was invariably right. Yet the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, gave preference to the Agriculture Ministry because Mr Glavany was a charismatic leader close to the farming lobby.

"Our hearings allowed us to determine that politicians at the highest level played with people's health out of economic interests," Mr Francois Sauvadet, who heads the commission, told Le Figaro.

Although it is most critical of French authorities, the report does not spare Britain, whose attitude it describes as "unjustifiable".

The EU Commission was guilty of "inertia", the report says, and a "law of silence" reigned within the agricultural community. "Those involved in the food chain did not assume their responsibilities and mutually accused one another," it notes.

The Paris prosecutor yesterday opened a preliminary investigation against Gen Paul Aussaresses (83) for justifying war crimes. If tried and convicted, the retired army officer risks five years in prison and a £36,000 fine.

In a recent book, Gen Aussaresses confessed to torturing and murdering Algerian rebels during the 1954-1962, war with the full knowledge of the government. The prosecutor rejected two lawsuits for crimes against humanity on the grounds that French law punishes such acts only if they were committed during the second World War or after 1994.