France’s interior minister on Wednesday confirmed two security officers would be ensuring Nicolas Sarkozy’s protection while he serves jail time in a criminal conspiracy case involving Libya.
The former head of state would usually benefit from “a protection arrangement given his status and the threats against him”, an arrangement that “has indeed been maintained in detention”, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez told local media.
Two security officers are stationed in a neighbouring cell in La Sante prison in Paris, where Sarkozy was incarcerated on Tuesday, the sources said.
The right-wing leader from 2007 to 2012 was found guilty last month of seeking to acquire funding for the campaign that saw him elected from Moamer Kadhafi’s Libya.
He was handed a five-year prison term for criminal conspiracy.
Sarkozy’s legal team has requested his release pending his appeal trial, but says he is expected to remain in jail for at least “three weeks to a month”. A prison warden representative on Wednesday called the bodyguards’ presence an insult to his profession.
“They’re basically telling us we don’t know how to do our jobs,” Wilfried Fonck, the head of the UFAP UNSa Justice union, told RTL radio. “Today we have two civilians inside a prison who shouldn’t be there,” and who don’t know how the system works, he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in 25 years on the job.”
Sarkozy was expected to be held in a nine square metre (95 square foot) cell in the prison’s solitary confinement wing to avoid contact with other prisoners, prison staff told AFP.
In solitary confinement, prisoners are allowed out of their cells for one walk a day, alone, in a small yard. Sarkozy will also be allowed visits three times a week.
Sarkozy is the first former head of a European Union state to be jailed, and the first French leader to be incarcerated since Philippe Petain, the Nazi collaborationist head of state who was jailed after World War II.