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A prominent French modelling agent who was a former close associate of disgraced American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein has been found dead in his Paris prison cell, prosecutors said on Saturday.
Epstein, who was arrested in New York in July 2019 on charges of trafficking underage girls for sex, was found hanged in his New York jail cell the following month while awaiting trial over abuses involving girls at his Palm Beach home and on his private island in the Caribbean.
His former associate Jean-Luc Brunel, in his mid 70s, had been charged with the rape of minors and held in prison since December 2020.
He was briefly freed in late 2021 but then re-incarcerated on a Paris court of appeal ruling.
A source close to the investigation told AFP that he had been found dead overnight Friday to Saturday. Paris prosecutors later confirmed he had died.
The source said he had been found hanged but this was not confirmed by prosecutors.
Police are now investigating the cause of the death, added the source, who asked not to be named. Brunel’s death means that his case is now closed, unless other suspects are implicated in the same case in the future.
Brunel had denied the charges. He was first detained in December 2020 at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport.
“His tragedy is that of a 75-year-old man crushed by a media-judicial system, about which there will now be time to ask questions,” his lawyers, Mathias Chichportich, Marianne Abgrall and Christophe Ingrain said in a statement.
“Jean-Luc Brunel had always maintained his innocence and had intensified his efforts to prove it,” it said, adding that his apparent suicide was “not guided by guilt but a profound sense of injustice”.
Allegations from women who say they were abused in France in the Epstein case prompted French prosecutors to open their own investigation.
That probe focused on Brunel,…
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Source : france24
