A court in France has sentenced paedophile and former surgeon Joel Le Squarnec (20) to a maximum sentence of 74 years in prison for raping and sexually abusing hundreds of patients, mostly children, over more than two decades.
Le Skuarnek was convicted after admitting to abusing nearly 300 victims in one of the largest child sexual abuse cases in France.
The public raised the question of how he could have abused so many people for so long.
The judges accepted the public prosecutor's recommendation regarding the length of the sentence, and the criminal court in Morbihan, in the west of the country, ordered that Le Skuarnek serve at least two-thirds of his sentence before he can be released.
However, the court did not order preventive detention after sentencing, which angered many victims.
Solen Podevan Favre, president of the group for the protection of children victims of incest and other sexual crimes, expressed shock at the verdict and the fact that preventive detention was not ordered after the sentence was pronounced.
"It's certainly the maximum sentence. But it's the least we could have hoped for. Still, in six years he could potentially be released. It's astonishing," she said.
Le Skuarnek has been in prison since 2017 and is already serving a 15-year prison sentence for a 2020 conviction for rape and sexual assault of four children, including two girls from his own family.
Under French law, the sentences are served concurrently, and Le Skuarnek is only supposed to serve additional years after completing his first sentence.
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