Seznec affair

The Seznec Affair was a controversial French court case of 1923–1924.

The wood merchant Pierre Quéméneur disappeared on the night of 25 to 26 May 1923, during his business trip from Brittany to Paris. He was reportedly connected to negotiations for the sale of stocks of cars left behind by the United States Army in the aftermath of World War I, with the stocks offered for sale to the Soviet Union. Quéméneur's body was never recovered, but the head of a sawmill Joseph Marie Guillaume Seznec was arrested and charged with Quéméneur's murder. He was the last known person to have seen Quéméneur alive. Seznec was found guilty on 4 November 1924, and send to a prison in French Guiana.

Seznec was released in May 1947, with a decree of remission of his final sentence. He was mortally injured in a road accident in 1953, and died of his injuries in February 1954. In 2005, his case was posthumously reopened because of suspicions that he was framed for murder by a trainee inspector with a history of manipulating evidence. In December 2006, the Cour de révision refused to annul Seznec's conviction, judging that there was no new evidence to call doubt on Seznec's guilt.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.