Dupont de Ligonnes case: The Parisian apologizes

After announcing with other media the arrest of Xavier Dupont de Ligonnes – information then denied by a DNA test – Le Parisien Saturday apologized to "the family of victims" and the person wrongly arrested in Scotland.

The daily, the first to announce the arrest in Glasgow on Friday night, followed by AFP, has "apologized to the family of the victims and that of the person wrongly arrested," said in a statement Stephane Albouy , editorial director.

Le Parisien, which is owned by the LVMH group and is part of the group Les Echos-Le Parisien, also expressed "for all of our readers, our most sincere regret for having made public information that turned out to be wrong. "

Suspected of having killed his wife and four children in Nantes in April 2011, Xavier Dupont de Ligonnes has not been found for eight years.

"We were alerted by one of our usual sources that reported a significant advance + in this case," said AFP Mr. Albouy.

"We contacted five French judicial sources, at different levels of hierarchy and both central and regional.We are not talking about five people sitting in the same office," he said. "We multiplied the search and confirmation angles, it was at a very high level of verification".

For its part, AFP confirmed the information based on a total of four different French police sources, with which journalists are used to working in confidence.

All note that "according to the Scottish police" the fingerprints of the man arrested in Glasgow "correspond" and that there is no conditional in what the Scots report.

Asked by AFP, French or Scottish sources have at this stage provided no explanation for the origin of this error.