The trial of the accused French Nazi collaborator, Mr Maurice Papon, was suspended yesterday after he fell ill during a courtroom session. "He began to tremble, he turned pale. The presiding judge decided to suspend the session," said Mr Francis Vuillemin, one of Mr Papon's attorneys.
Mr Vuillemin said Mr Papon (87) had "an emotional shock" during testimony by Ms Ginette Chappel, a witness called by the defence in the course of testimony on Mr Papon's character.
The trial, now in its third week and expected to last until Christmas, was interrupted during its opening week when Mr Papon fell ill and was rushed to hospital. The former minister underwent a heart by-pass operation last year and has heart disease.
He is on trial for wartime crimes against humanity, charged with ordering the arrest of 1,560 Jews from the Bordeaux region during the Nazi occupation years, when he was a senior civil servant in the Vichy regime. He has denied the charges.
Meanwhile, France has ordered an official inquiry into the 1961 killing of Algerian protesters in Paris after a newspaper published records which it said proved far more died than has been admitted so far.
The interior ministry said in a statement that the report would reveal "the contents of archives of the Paris police and its services on everything concerning events related to the protest of October 17th, 1961. This report will be made public."
The daily Liberation published what it said were official records of the names of some Algerians killed in the protest, backing accusations that the toll was far higher than the three deaths officially admitted.
Historians say between 200 and 300 people were killed by police in the protest, and many corpses were thrown into the Seine.
The long hushed-up massacre came back to light this month during the trial of Mr Papon, who was Paris police chief in 1961.
Mr Papon says the Algerians died in fights between rival pro-independence movements.
Liberation published a picture of a page of the state prosecutor's records, bearing the names of eight Algerians and a French man with the stamp "dead", a hand written annotation "murder", and a later amendment "case dropped". Two others were listed as unidentified FMA (Muslim French of Algeria), the official designation for Algerians in the period before the North African country was granted independence in 1962.