Quai des Orfèvres : Reports, news and investigations

Once the backdrop to novelist Georges Simenon’s commissaire Jules Maigret, and now that of the gritty French TV series Spiral, the building that stands at number 36 quai des Orfèvres in central Paris is the longstanding home to several of the capital’s elite police investigation squads. French documentary filmmaker and writer Raynal Pellicer was given exceptional access to the workings of one of the grittiest of these, the serious crime squad, and, with the illustrator Titwane, this month publishes an unusual and painstakingly detailed book of sketches and text on the day-to-day reality of the officers' often macabre jobs. Louise Fessard reports.

The tourist accused officers from an elite police unit of raping her in premises of what was long the equivalent of London’s Scotland Yard.

The unnamed officer, 34, was picked up while on holiday in the southern city of Perpignan by officers probing theft of €3m drugs haul.

The 50 kg of cocaine, seized in police raids in northern Paris in early July, had been stored in a special room secured with an armoured door.

A 34-year-old woman from Toronto who said her father was a Canadian policeman said she was gang-raped by four elite French police officers.

Quai des Orfèvres

An illustrated record of the macabre world of 'le 36', the Paris police HQ

Paris police undergo DNA tests in investigation into rape of Canadian woman

French policeman seized in massive cocaine hunt

€2.5 million in cocaine ‘disappears’ from Paris police HQ

Paris police officers arrested over gang-rape allegation by Canadian tourist