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GUERET, France: A convicted British conman who featured in a Netflix documentary was sentenced on Thursday to six years in prison by a French court for running over and injuring two police officers while trying to escape.
Robert Hendy-Freegard, also known as David Hendy, became notorious as the central figure in the documentary “The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman” and the fictional film “Rogue Agent,” both available on Netflix.
In 2005, a London court had sentenced Hendy-Freegard to life in prison for kidnapping, deception and stealing from students and women — from whom he took more than £1 million ($1.24 million at current exchange rates) — while posing as a spy for MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service.
But he was freed in 2009 after an appeals court overturned his conviction for kidnapping on the grounds that there had been no physical constraint.
Coercive behavior in an intimate setting, or psychological manipulation, was not a crime in British law at the time.
More than a decade later, Hendy-Freegard, now 53, appeared in court on Thursday for running over and injuring two police officers in central France’s sparsely populated Creuse region in August 2022.
“I had enough. I panicked,” he told the court in the town of Gueret.
State prosecutor Alexandra Pethieu had requested a seven-year prison sentence, saying the escape attempt resulted in “an appalling scene worthy of ‘Mad Max’.”
At the time of the incident, Hendy-Freegard had been living on and off in the nearby village of Vidaillat under a fake name since 2015, illegally breeding dogs.
While he often left his home for long periods, a haggard-looking woman always stayed behind to look after a pack of noisy beagles, never leaving the property and hardly interacting with neighbors.
Her neighbors — many of them retirees — told AFP they grew increasingly concerned over the years, especially after discovering online Hendy-Freegard’s real name and discovering his criminal past.
They said they repeatedly alerted the authorities, who said there was nothing they could do as the woman had not filed a complaint.
Vets had inspected conditions at the kennels and demanded the owner improve them, but did not follow up their inspections.
Then local residents watched the Netflix documentary about Hendy-Freegard that came out in early 2022, in which the son and daughter of a woman called Sandra Clifton appealed for help to find her, saying she had disappeared with the serial swindler.
She looked exactly like the woman holed up in the house next door.
The neighbors said they contacted the children, and both came over separately that summer to try to draw their mother out from the grip of the conman, who was away but controlling her behavior over the phone after convincing her that her family was against her.
In August 2022, her son came over, and with the mayor’s office and neighbors, took advantage of repeated warnings from the local animal welfare authority to organize for animal rescuers to take over the care of the beagles so Clifton would agree to leave.
As they were loading the last of the beagles into a truck to be taken away by a charity, Hendy-Freegard turned up in his car.
A neighbor who saw the events, but asked to remain anonymous, said police on site to oversee the procedure started to question Hendy-Freegard.
“They checked his papers, but he still had the keys in the ignition. He turned on the engine and fled, hitting the two cops,” the neighbor said.
Hendy-Freegard managed to escape as far as Belgium, but was arrested and then extradited back to France, where he has been in custody since October 2022.
Clifton has since returned to Britain.

ATHENS: Rights groups are demanding criminal charges be brought against members of Greece’s coast guard over a deadly 2023 migrant shipwreck, after the country’s ombudsman released a report noting “clear indications” that officers had overlooked the danger posed by the boat that sank.
The Adriana, a massively overcrowded fishing trawler, had been heading from Libya to Italy with an estimated 500-750 people on board when it sank in international waters west of Pylos in western Greece in June 2023. Only 104 people survived, while 82 bodies were recovered. The rest went down with the trawler in one of the deepest parts of the Mediterranean.
An independent investigation by Greece’s ombudsman into the shipwreck concluded this week that there were “clear indications” that eight senior coast guard officers should face disciplinary action for overlooking the dangers posed by the trawler.
The coast guard, which had been notified about the boat by Italian authorities, had been shadowing the vessel for hours as it sailed in international waters but within Greece’s area of responsibility for search and rescue.
At the time, the coast guard said the Adriana’s captain had insisted he did not want assistance and wanted to continue sailing to Italy. But several survivors said passengers had been calling for help repeatedly, and said that the boat capsized during an attempt by the Greek coast guard to tow it.
The ombudsman said Monday its report noted “a series of serious and reproachable omissions in the search and rescue duties by senior officers of the Hellenic Coast Guard which constitute clear indications” for establishing a case against the officers for endangering the lives of the Adriana’s passengers.
The independent body began its own investigation in November 2023 after “the direct refusal of a disciplinary investigation by the Coast Guard,” it said.
The Shipping and Island Policy Ministry, under whose jurisdiction the coast guard lies, rejected the ombudsman’s report, accusing it of “attempting to shift the conversation from the criminal smuggling networks to the members of the coast guard, who fight day and night for the protection of the country.”
It accused the report of frequently favoring versions of events that called into question the coast guard’s actions “without the slightest credible evidence.”
“At a time when irregular migration is causing global concern, the government remains steadfastly committed to a strict but fair policy of guarding the country’s borders,” the statement said.
Rights groups hailed the ombudsman’s report, and blasted the government’s reaction. The ministry’s statement “is a monument of hypocrisy but also a confession it will continue to cover up the crime,” said the Movement United Against Racism and the Fascist Threat, or KEERFA, which called for a protest rally outside a naval court in the Greece’s main port city of Piraeus Thursday evening.
Lawyers representing some of the survivors filed a request with the Piraeus naval court in December seeking criminal charges to be brought against members of the search and rescue operation.
“The transparency of administrative action and the attribution of responsibilities, where applicable, for the deadly Pylos shipwreck is an elementary legal demand, inextricably linked to the respect of the rule of law,” Ombudsman Andreas Pottakis said in a statement. “As is the thorough investigation of any other incident connected to the violation of the right to life, health and physical integrity.”