The former president of a Paris university has been placed under investigation over a scandal in which human bodies donated for research were left piled up and decomposing, reports BBC News.
Biologist Frédéric Dardel is accused of "desecrating a corpse". He headed Paris-Descartes University in 2012-2019, in Paris's famous Latin Quarter.
The university's Centre for Body Donations received hundreds of bodies before it was closed.
In 2019 L'Express magazine discovered shocking conditions at that centre.
It reported that dozens of bodies were stored "nude, decomposing, piled up on gurneys, with their eyes wide open". It called the centre "a mass grave in the heart of Paris".
Some rotting bodies had even been nibbled by mice, the magazine reported, with staff forced to incinerate them before they had been dissected.
Mr Dardel's lawyer Marie-Alix Canu-Bernard said recently in her client had repeatedly requested government funding to renovate the centre - pleas that went unheeded. She blamed the centre's dilapidated condition on state neglect.
"He never stopped lobbying for grants," she said. "That shows, just as with other essential public services, the manifest negligence of the state. If anyone made an effort it was certainly him."
The centre, founded in 1953, was shut down in 2019.