France's former prime minister Dominique de Villepin on Sunday denied any link between arms deals and the deaths of 11 French engineers in a bombing in Pakistan in 2002.
Witnesses have alleged the bombing was revenge for the cancelling of kickbacks paid to officials in the arms deals, in a complex case linked to alleged illegal political funding and implicating President Nicolas Sarkozy. Villepin said on Sunday: "To my knowledge there is no link" between the cancelled commissions and the bombing and "there is no formal proof of kickbacks" to intermediaries in France as some have claimed.
The president at the time Jacques Chirac "chose to cancel the commissions for non-Pakistani intermediaries" in the arms deals dating to 1995. "In the context I do not see that there was a risk," he said. "One event was in 1995, the other was in 2002, there wasn't the same Pakistani government nor the same circumstances in Pakistan."