Two men and a woman appeared in a French court Monday in a case over a Cannes Film Festival high-end prostitution ring that had ties to a son of slain Libyan dictator Moamer Gaddafi. Seven men and a woman went on trial in the southern port city of Marseille, though the five chief figures are on the run and are being tried in absentia. They include Elie Nahas, a Lebanese who claimed to run a modelling agency employing young women recruited in South America, France and eastern Europe. The three who turned up in court were: an alleged escort girl from Cannes, Sabrina Samari, who has admitted to procuring women; a Venezuelan named Felix Farias who worked for a branch of Nahas’s agency; and a Lebanese driver, Antoine El Khoury. Nahas is accused of organising a birthday bash for one of Gaddafi’s sons Mutassim in 2004 costing $1.5 million (1.1 million euros) with several stars and about 20 models in attendance. Mutassim Gaddafi was killed with his father on October 20 last year. Investigators never questioned the son. Nahas also caused a scandal in 2007 when he turned up at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport with eight young women, one of whom was a minor, to attend the Cannes Film Festival. They were refused entry. They were due to stay in a 136-metre-long luxury yacht “La Savarona” which had been rented for 350,000 euros a week.
