FRANCE
Photo: Alizee Touami/AFP/Getty Images
French judicial sources have revealed that a senior Public Servant has been charged with treason.
It is alleged Benoît Quennedey (pictured), a senior administrator in France’s Senate, spied for North Korea.
A judicial source said Mr Quennedey has been charged with “passing on information to a foreign power”.
If released on bail, he will be barred from leaving the country or continuing his work in the Senate.
A Senate spokesperson said Mr Quennedey had been suspended from his job as an administrator in the Department of Architecture, Heritage and Gardens and his office had been searched by police.
Mr Quennedey has travelled extensively throughout the Korean Peninsula, according to the website of his publisher, Delga.
In a video posted on YouTube, he described impoverished, isolated North Korea as a “model for development”, praising citizens’ free access to education and health care.
“I’ve been there seven times since 2005, and in North Korea you notice it, there’s no litter on the ground,” Mr Quennedey said in the video.
Mr Quennedey has since 2007 been President of the Franco-Korean Friendship Association, which was formed in the late 1960s by journalists sympathetic to socialist and communist causes.
The group pushes for closer ties with Pyongyang and supports the reunification of the divided Koreas.
Mr Quennedey attended France’s elite Sciences Po University as well as the ENA School, which produces leading PS staff and political leaders.
A former classmate said Mr Quennedey had been praising North Korea as a utopian state for nearly 20 years, dismissing its perception as a dictatorial regime as an “American plot”.
Paris, 30 November 2018
