THE WRONG MAN
The arrest of a man wrongly believed to be a French murder suspect was triggered by a tip-off from police in England.
The tip-off that an alleged killer was living in Scotland led to the arrest and detention of an innocent pensioner at Glasgow Airport nine days ago.
Police believed he was murder suspect Xavier Dupont de Ligonnes, 58, after being told he was living in Scotland and travelling regularly between his home and France.
The arrested man, a 69-year-old retired car factory worker, lives in Dunoon for part of the year with his Scottish wife.
The Scots and French suggested each other was responsible but, we reveal, the intelligence originated from police in England.
A French source said: “We received information from the UK that Xavier Dupont de Ligonnes would be flying from Paris to Glasgow.”
On the Friday, the French received a call from the UK saying the suspect was due on an easyjet flight arriving in Glasgow at 2.30pm.
The source said: “The call from London came too late to mount a surveillance operation. This is when the French asked the Scottish to arrest the suspect.”
French investigators had by this point viewed CCTV footage from CDG Airport and were unconvinced about the likeness of the suspect with de Ligonnes.
On Saturday morning, Scottish police said the correlation between the two sets of fingerprints was “only partial”. It was then confirmed the man who’d been wrongly arrested had his passport stolen at CDG Airport in 2014 but had since obtained a replacement. He was released from custody.
De Ligonnes has been on the run since 2011 when his wife, four children and two pet dogs were killed at their home in Nantes.