PARIS (Guardian) -- The biggest child abuse trial in French history will open in Brittany this month amid anger that a surgeon was allegedly able to attack hundreds of young patients over decades, targeting some when they were under anaesthetic, in the post-surgery recovery room or in their hospital beds.
France is braced for serious questions over child protection amid harrowing testimony from a record number of alleged victims of Joël Le Scouarnec, 73, who worked as a digestive surgeon. He was employed in public and private hospitals across Brittany and the west of France, often operating on children with appendicitis.
Despite being flagged to the French authorities by the FBI in 2004 for viewing child abuse imagery on the dark web, for which he was convicted and given a four-year suspended prison sentence in France in 2005, he was never prevented from working with children and continued to gain prestigious jobs in hospitals across the country.
Evidence in the four-month trial will include handwritten notebooks in which Le Scouarnec listed patients’ initials and his alleged crimes against them. Police cross-checked the notebooks with hospital records to identify potential victims, with some having been unconscious and under anaesthetic at the time.
In a pattern of alleged abuse that stretched from 1989 to 2014, Le Scouarnec is charged with the rape or sexual assault of 299 patients, 158 male and 141 female. A total of 256 were under 15 years old, and the average age was 11.
Francesca Satta is a lawyer for 10 of the victims, including the families of two men who took their lives after they were told by gendarmes what had allegedly happened to them. 
Satta said it was devastating for many of the alleged victims, now in their 30s and 40s, to hear passages from Le Scouarnec’s diaries that allegedly concerned them as children.
The trial opens on 24 February in Vannes and will run until June.