As the French lawyer Mr Arno Klarsfeld said: "The government and the justice system are responsible for Papon's escaping. If he had raped a little girl, he wouldn't have been able to run away."
In a country where domestic intelligence agents keep watch on political parties, trade unions and journalists, Liberation newspaper noted, it's hard to believe the interior ministry could not keep track of a convicted 89-year-old war criminal.
Maurice Papon, former prefect of the Paris police and a former cabinet minister, is now France's most wanted man, after the country's highest court yesterday rejected his appeal and Papon's 10-year prison sentence for assisting the second World War deportation of 1,500 Jews from Bordeaux to Nazi death camps came into effect.
Papon was convicted by the Bordeaux assize court of "complicity in crimes against humanity" in April 1998. Fearing he would lose his final appeal, he announced on Wednesday that he had chosen to go into exile rather than enter prison, as French law requires, on the eve of the supreme court hearing.
Swiss authorities confirmed that Papon and at least three companions stayed at the Forum Hotel in Martigny, 120 km from Geneva, from October 11th until the 15th. At the Paris Palais de Justice yesterday he was rumoured to have taken refuge in a Tibetan monastery in Switzerland.
In a book published this month, No One Was Interested in the Truth, Papon said he had converted to Buddhism. But a photograph published two days ago in a Bordeaux newspaper showed him in shirt sleeves in the sunshine, reading the Figaro newspaper of October 16th. "His old bones need warmth," his friend Mr Hubert de Beaufort said, trying to convince journalists he was in Spain.
Papon had spent the months preceding his trial in Marbella. Another rumour said he was heading for Santiago, Chile.
Eighteen years have passed since French survivors of the Nazi holocaust revealed Papon's shameful war record. By 1981, the French civil servant had risen to the rank of budget minister under President Giscard d'Estaing. At the time, Jewish groups asked only that he resign from his cabinet position and apologise to the Bordeaux Jewish community, but he refused to do so. For the following 14 years, President Mitterrand prevented the Papon case from coming to trial on the grounds it would harm France.
Papon's flight has caused widespread indignation. For the past month, Mr Klarsfeld, who represented civil plaintiffs at his trial, repeatedly warned French authorities that Papon would run away rather than return to prison.
In 1997, he entered hospital after three nights in a common criminal's cell, then moved to a luxury hotel where he drank vintage bordeaux. In his book he cited his own 1940s diary. An entry from January 1944 noted his anger with an employee who was 10 minutes late for work, but failed to mention that at the same time, and under his orders, 317 Jews were arrested and held for two days in the synagogue before being deported in cold, dirty cattle cars to the death camps.
Mrs Elisabeth Guigou, the Justice Minister, said French authorities had merely followed regulations in leaving Mr Papon without surveillance. But she said it was "scandalous" that a man who claimed to have defended the French state by staying at his post throughout the Vichy period should now deem himself above the law.
