Track legend fine sparks outcry

A FRENCH court yesterday ordered former athletics world champion Eunice Barber to pay a €5,000 fine for insulting and biting a police officer and resisting arrest.

But the 34-year-old Sierra Leone-born athlete denounced the verdict as “worse than injustice” after the hearing near Paris, insisting she was the victim of police brutality.

“I am guilty of nothing at all,” Barber, who won heptathlon and long jump world titles for France in 1999 and 2003, said after the hearing, vowing to appeal.

“They (the police) know what they did.”

The athlete claims that two years ago she was slapped on the face after she opened her car window to talk to an officer who stopped her when she turned down a street that was closed to traffic in the suburb of Saint Denis.

The officer denied the accusation.

Six officers wrestled her to the ground to handcuff her, in a struggle that was caught on amateur video and posted on the Internet.

Barber says the police described her as a “cannibal” as they brought her in to the station, where she spent 28 hours in custody.

At her trial last month she said she bit the officer “to protect” her body, her “source of work” and accused the police of humiliating her, “perhaps out of racism.”

Barber was also sentenced to pay the six officers between €350 and €1,050 each in damages plus €700 in legal costs. The prosecution had sought a two-month suspended jail sentence.

An activist group that is calling for the decriminalisation of insulting behaviour towards police denounced the verdict as “scandalous”.

“Eunice Barber was convicted even though she was the victim of racist police,” CODEDO said in a statement.

“We heard about this affair because Eunice Barber is well known... but this sort of thing happens every day in all parts of the country,” it continued. “Perhaps it is time to launch a national debate on police violence.”

The group compared Barber’s arrest to that last Friday of a newspaper boss who was due to be questioned by a judge in a libel case, a case which has sparked a national outcry.

Vittorio de Filippis of the left-wing Liberation newspaper said he was handcuffed, strip-searched twice and questioned without a lawyer present after officers turned up at his house before dawn and took him in to a police station.

President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday said he understood the “emotion” sparked by the newsman’s arrest and said he was setting up a commission charged with making arrest procedures “more respectful of rights and individual dignity”.

* See the video: http://tinyurl.com/5abgfe