Senator sentenced over calls

An elderly French senator was handed a three-month suspended jail term for making insulting telephone calls to constituents, threatening to burn their houses or kill them.

Senator Kleber Malecot, 82, was convicted by a Paris court of making the calls in 1992 when he was mayor of the central town of Neuville-les- Bois.

A member of the rightist Union for French Democracy, he denied making the calls and insisted he was the victim of a political plot.