By putting three former government ministers on trial for manslaughter, France had hoped to exorcise its decade-old obsession with the blood scandal in which more than 4,500 people contracted AIDs in the mid-1980s. But the verdict handed down yesterday satisfied no one.

An excruciating, almost physical, tension hung in the courtroom as the presiding judge read the jury's conclusions.

Mr Laurent Fabius, president of the French National Assembly and prime minister at the time of the events: acquitted.

Mrs Georgina Dufoix, former minister of social affairs: acquitted.

Mr Edmond Herve, Mrs Dufoix's junior minister for health: guilty of manslaughter in the case of little Sarah Malik, who died in infancy, and guilty of grievous bodily harm in the case of Mrs Sylvie Rouy.

A thousand French people have died due to government negligence, and the health minister was found guilty in only two cases; guilty but exempt from punishment.

The jury of three professional judges and 12 parliamentarians said Mr Herve had suffered enough during five years of legal proceedings, during which he "was unable to benefit totally from the presumption of innocence, being subjected, before trial, to often excessive pre-judgments . . ." Judges admitted privately that Mr Herve's partial conviction without punishment was the sop they threw to the masses, an attempt to mollify public rage.

As the verdict was read, blue-uniformed gendarmes formed a cordon between the families of the victims and the defendants.

"Shame on you!" somebody cried out from the front row. "You have blood on your hands!" screamed another. "You won't get your honour back, Monsieur Herve!" a third taunted.

As they filed out, protected by the wall of gendarmes, the three former ministers and their lenient judges seemed to symbolise France's discredited political class. An opinion poll by Paris Match showed that 83 per cent of French people followed the three-week trial closely, and a large majority believed from the outset that it was rigged.

Mr Fabius and Mrs Dufoix slipped away quietly, but Mr Herve confronted the television cameras. "The decision of the court lacked courage," the former health minister said. "They didn't have the courage to acquit me completely, and they didn't have the courage to truly convict me."

Nor was Mrs Sylvie Rouy, the pale, 36-year-old woman who listened to the verdict in a wheelchair, satisfied. Mrs Rouy contracted AIDs and hepatitis C from a transfusion after giving birth in August 1985. Like Mrs Brigid McCole, the Irish hepatitis C victim who died in 1996, she has devoted what is left of her life to seeking justice.

The judges were so affected by her appearance in court that they felt they had to respond in some way, and so convicted Mr Herve for failing to destroy the specific blood stocks that contaminated her.

Weeping in the vestibule of the conference centre where the trial was held, Mrs Rouy said Mr Herve was not the only person responsible for her contamination. "Politicians are like gangsters," she said. "Unless you catch them red-handed, they always get away. This trial was a denial of justice. I'll keep fighting as long as there's a breath of life in me."

In Ireland, 1,300 women contracted hepatitis C and 200 haemophiliacs got HIV and/or hepatitis C from contaminated blood products. Although the scale of the French blood disaster is greater, the similarities are stunning.

In both states the abuse of public trust will take decades to heal. In both states responsibility was a diffuse and evasive notion, and health authorities and politicians wriggled out of accountability by claiming ignorance. It was as if, faced with similar public health crises, Irish and French officials were pre-programmed to respond in the same inadequate manner.

MR HERVE'S ministry issued a decree in June 1983 demanding that prisoners, homosexuals and drug addicts be barred from donating blood. The decree was never enforced, and as a result 56 per cent of all sero-positive transfusion recipients in Europe are French.

In Ireland, the Blood Transfusion Service Board also violated its own rules by making blood products from plasma taken from donors who had received multiple transfusions or suffered from jaundice.

The BTSB decided to use up anti-D vaccine even though it was known to be contaminated with hepatitis C. Its French counterpart, the French National Blood Transfusion Centre, used up its HIV-tainted blood products rather than lose money by destroying them.

But, by pursuing the former prime minister, France took the quest for culprits further than Ireland has. There is something of a Jacobin "off with their heads" mentality in the pursuit of such high-ranking officials, who cling monarch-like to their privileges and impunity. And unlike Ireland, France has punished individuals in its blood scandal.

From 1993 until 1995, Mr Michel Garretta, head of the French blood board, served 30 months of a four-year sentence for "fraudulent sale" of contaminated blood products.

Perhaps the greatest error was to try the ministers before a special court. The public assumed that the Court of Justice of the Republic was set up by politicians to protect politicians. The presiding judge repeatedly showed gross ignorance of the case. One judge was seen sleeping through afternoon sessions. The victims were not allowed to sue as civil plaintiffs and the "prosecutor" often argued in favour of the defendants. A third trial, of 32 lower-ranking officials implicated in the mass contamination, should take place in a criminal court next year.

The right-wing former finance minister, Mr Alain Madelin, said yesterday that the ministers' trial "acted as a magnifying glass on everything that is dysfunctional in French government".

It has also been called "a journey through the land of arrogance".

There were frightening revelations, for example that Mrs Dufoix declined an urgent request for a meeting by the head of the blood transfusion commission because she was too busy giving blood in front of television cameras.

The prosecutor denounced the inordinate power of ministerial advisers, who take important decisions on behalf of their bosses and block the flow of information to them. Thus, Mr Fabius was able to claim he had no knowledge of a May 1985 instruction, written on the Prime Minister's letterhead, that a US AIDs test should be held up to favour the French Pasteur test.

The blood transfusion commission was alerted in November 1984 that haemophiliacs were contracting AIDs from blood products. The report recommended heating blood products to kill the virus, but 11 months passed before this was done.

Following the April 15th, 1985, Atlanta Conference, the necessity of testing blood for AIDs was publicised throughout the world, including on French television by Prof Luc Montagnier, who had discovered the virus in 1983. Yet Mr Fabius did not announce obligatory testing until June 19th, and it did not take effect until August 1st.

During those months, hundreds more unwitting victims were contaminated.

Mr Fabius has over the past five years orchestrated a vast public relations campaign in which scientists, professors and politicians have defended him in the media. Some claimed that Mr Fabius, who is Jewish, was, like Capt Dreyfus or Leon Blum, a victim of anti-semitism. The strategy paid off yesterday.

Far from holding Mr Fabius criminally liable, the court found that "the action of Laurent Fabius helped to speed up the decision process."