Frenchwoman freed from Mexico jail sues ex-president

Florence Cassez filed the civil suit against Mexico's ex-President Felipe Calderon and others Friday, lawyer Jose Patino Hurtado told Noticias MVS radio, with his client demanding compensation for suffering and “moral damage”.

The lawsuit seeks “above all to vindicate Florence Cassez, which is the most important thing,” Patino Hurtado said.

Along with Calderon, the suit names former Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna and other officials, as well as the Televisa TV network and journalists including the prominent anchor Carlos Loret de Mola.

A Televisa spokesman said the company had no immediate comment. Calderon called the lawsuit “absurd” in an interview with journalist Joaquin Lopez Doriga on Radio Formula.

‘They prefabricated everything’

Cassez, 40, became a cause célèbre in her native France after she was arrested in 2005 and sentenced to 60 years on charges of aiding a kidnapping ring allegedly led by her Mexican boyfriend, Israel Vallarta, in a case that soured relations between Paris and Mexico City.

She acknowledged living with the boyfriend at a ranch where kidnap victims were being held, but professed her innocence, saying she was unaware of their presence. One victim identified her as a kidnapper, but by voice only rather than by sight.

A day after Cassez was arrested, police forced her to take part in a staged scene of officers freeing kidnap victims. The staged raid, in which she was portrayed as a kidnapper, was broadcast on television.

“They knew the damage they would cause, and they prefabricated everything,” Patino Hurtado said Monday.

Two consecutive French presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, campaigned for her release, before her conviction was overturned by Mexico’s Supreme Court in 2013, due to procedural and rights violations.

After Cassez’s release, the Interior Department said it would instruct Federal Police to read suspects their rights when they are detained.

Though she was greeted with a hero’s welcome upon her return to France many in Mexico, where anti-crime activists had vigorously opposed her release, were indignant that a woman they believed to be a kidnapper had gone free.

(FRANCE 24 with AP)