.The health ministry in France has issued a warning after eight people died and seven fell sick in two European countries from using heroin contaminated by anthrax.
“Since December 6, there have been 15 confirmed cases of anthrax among heroin users, 14 in Scotland and one in Germany,” the ministry’s General Directorate for Health (DGS) said in a statement. “The likeliest source is heroin contaminated by anthrax spores.
“Eight people died,” it said.
Anthrax is a potentially lethal bacterium that exists naturally in the soil and can also occur among cattle. .
The ministry said the contaminated drug may also be circulating in France and other European countries. It is also, more notoriously, a potential bio-terror weapon.
–
.
“There is no outward sign or colour enabling the user to tell whether the heroin has been contaminated by anthrax, and contaminated heroin dissolves or is used in the same way as uncontaminated heroin,” it said
.The niece of a British government minister has told a court she drunkenly plunged a knife into the naked body of a Frenchman she picked up in a bar, but has no idea why she did it.
Jessica Davies, 30, told her French murder trial she had blacked out and had no recollection of killing Olivier Mugnier except “the sensation of the knife going in”.
“I am horrified by what I have done,” said the niece of Britain’s junior defence minister Quentin Davies. I don’t remember killing Olivier, but I take responsibility for killing him.
“I remember telling the police that I was a monster.
Davies called emergency services after the stabbing.”
Davies says she no longer remembers making a statement the day of the November 2007 that said “I just wanted to cut him a little but the knife went in by itself”.
They arrived around 2:40 am (local time) on Sunday morning but within an hour Mugnier had succumbed to the two knife wounds, one of which went right through his body and touched his spine. .
Police told the court there was no sign of a struggle in the one-bedroom flat and that neighbours had heard nothing.
Earlier the court heard how Davies developed behavioural problems after the acrimonious divorce of her parents when she was 14 and how she was badly affected by her maternal grandmother’s repeated suicide attempts.
The blood-stained kitchen knife that killed 24-year-old Mugnier was passed around for inspection by the three judges and the nine members of the jury at the court in Versailles.
Her mother broke down in tears at one point as she comprehensive her daughter’s difficult adolescent and university years.
She started drinking heavily as a teenager and by the time she was in university, “I was drunk six days out of seven” she said, adding that she had also developed a cocaine habit.
Davies faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison if convicted of voluntary homicide without premeditation.
Davies faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison if convicted of voluntary homicide without premeditation.
-
.The niece of a British government minister is set to face court accused of the murder of a young Frenchman whose throat was slit after she brought him to her home.
Jessica Davies contacted police in the early hours of a Sunday morning in November 2007 to say she had stabbed 24-year-old Olivier Mugnier at her apartment, in the Saint-Germain-en-Laye suburb west of Paris.
Police found stab wounds on the young man’s body, some of them on his throat.
Police said the now 30-year-old niece of Britain’s junior defence minister Quentin Davies was four times over the drink-drive alcohol limit and could barely stand or speak when they arrested her.
Legal sources said psychiatrists who had examined Davies found she suffered from psychological problems and had a “borderline” personality and that responsibility at the time of the crime was “altered”. His death was caused by a knife blow to the chest, police said.
The trial by jury in a court in Versailles is expected to last two days, with a verdict on Tuesday.
Davies, who is being held in Versailles women’s prison, claimed to remember nothing of the stabbing except that she had met Mr Mugnier in an Irish pub near her flat a few hours before his death.
The British press speculated after her arrest that Mr Mugnier’s death was the result of a sex game that turned to violence.
Davies faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison if convicted of voluntary homicide without premeditation.
The papers said French police have probed whether Davies was inspired by that murder, for which US student Amanda Knox was handed a 26-year prison term last month and for which her Italian boyfriend also got 26 years in jail.
British papers drew parallels with a high-profile sex game murder in Italy, just a few days earlier.
-