PARIS (Reuters) – Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was sentenced to seven years’ jail in France for money laundering, a judge ruled on Wednesday.
The 76-year-old former general was retried after being extradited from the United States to France in April.
He was convicted in absentia in 1999 of laundering money from Colombian drug cartels.
Born in the slums, Manuel Noriega muscled his way to the top of Panama’s military in the early 1980s and maintained a firm grip on power until being ousted by U.S. forces in 1989. He was tried and imprisoned for drug trafficking in the Untied States.
Noriega had been held pending his trial at the Sante prison in Paris, already home to another famous foreign inmate, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal — a Venezuelan radical sentenced to a life term for murder.
(Reporting by Thierry Leveque; Writing by John Irish; editing by Paul Taylor)
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