A lawyer who defended a surgeon dubbed France's worst paedophile has died in an apparent suicide, a prosecutor said on Wednesday.
Maxime Tessier, 34, represented the disgraced Joel Le Scouarnec, 74, who confessed at his trial to sexually assaulting or raping 298 patients between 1989 and 2014, many of them children.
'Everything points to suicide,' Frederic Teillet, chief prosecutor in the western French city of Rennes, said of the lawyer's death, adding that an investigation had been opened.
Tessier, a father of two young children, 'had a very high regard for justice and was therefore very demanding towards himself', said Catherine Glon, his associate.
'We are obviously in shock,' she added.
