A French surgeon to stand trial over raping or sexually assaulting almost 300 patients, mostly children, practised for decades right up until his retirement despite a conviction for owning abusive images of children and colleagues sounding the alarm, an AFP investigation shows.

Joel Le Scouarnec, 74, is already in jail after a court in 2020 found him guilty of abusing four children, including two of his nieces.

In a separate four-month trial to start on February 24, he faces allegations that he also assaulted or raped 299 patients, most while they were under general anaesthetic at a dozen hospitals between 1989 and 2014.

In total, 256 of the 299 victims were under 15, with the youngest aged one and the oldest aged 70.

The surgeon was never investigated during his career despite a 2005 sentence for owning sexually abusive images of children.

Investigators only uncovered his alleged crimes after he retired in 2017, when a six-year-old girl accused him of rape and police found countless accounts of abuse in his diaries.

Victims and child rights advocates say the case highlights systemic failures that allowed Le Scouarnec to repeatedly commit sexual crimes.

"How many people knew he was a paedophile and let him practise medicine in contact with children?" one of the victims told AFP, on condition of anonymity.

"They knew and they did nothing."

Le Scouarnec was practising in the western town of Lorient in 2004 when the FBI alerted French authorities that he was among hundreds in France who had been consulting sex abuse images of children online.

A court in nearby Vannes the following year handed him a suspended four-month jail sentence.

But by that time the doctor had already moved on to work in Quimperle, another town in the same region of........

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