| Four men, including two Britons and a Lebanese, appear in court in Paris Wednesday charged with running a pimping network that supplied male and female prostitutes to wealthy Middle Eastern clients. On the first day of the trial Tuesday, one of the accused - the Lebanese Wissam Nashef - claimed to have provided girls and boys to the son of the Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri and Prince Abdelaziz, son of Saudi King Fahd. The other accused are David Barrett and Ramsey Ataliah from Britain, and the Frenchman Patrice Quedville de Chardois. "Everyone was happy. I didn’t realise what I was doing," Quedville de Chardois told the court Tuesday. He admitted putting Barrett in contact with young men who then passed them on to clients. The young men received between USD 300 and USD 500 (EUR 245- EUR 405) for each meeting, he said. When Barrett was arrested in March 2003, police found a large sum of money in his apartment as well as a dossier on some 40 young women including photographs and the results of blood tests. Barrett told the court that the girls and boys were hired as escort agents, and that sex was not part of the arrangement. |