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Yikes! This is what a rat-infested French jail looks like

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Yikes! This is what a rat-infested French jail looks like
Photo: YouTube/France Bleu TV.

A French prisoner is suing his jail after it was infested with rats and judging by the video he took he has a stonewall case.

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The overcrowding crisis in France's prisons is not just limited to prisoners it seems. 

An inmate at a prison in northern France has caught on camera what appears to be pretty solid evidence of a rat infestation. And he's using it to take the prison to court.

The video below was reportedly shot at Sequedin prison in the Nord department in northern France.

It features various clips of scores of rats clambering over each other to get food in what appears to be the prison grounds.

The inmate's lawyer Olivier Cardon denounced the "deplorable conditions" of his client.

"My client eats with rats in his cell," said the lawyer. "He takes his shower with rats. The water in his shower stinks because there are rats in the pipes. Rats also scurry around the courtyard where my client walks," he added.

 
The lawyer himself complained about his own working conditions at having to practically jump over rats when he goes to visit his clients in the prison.
 
The video has echoes of a famous clip that went viral a couple of years ago when a tourist shot footage of his picnic in the Louvre gardens, among the rats.
 
 
The shock video emerges as conditions in France's prisons have come under the spotlight in recent weeks.
 
Earlier this month campaigners filed a complaint against the French state denouncing overcrowding and filthy conditions in a prison near Paris infested with rats, cockroaches and bedbugs.

The French-based International Prisons Observatory (OIP) backed its complaint with statements from inmates at Fresnes prison, 15 kilometres (nine miles) south of Paris.

"We are infested with bedbugs, bitten every night on the face, on the neck, the shoulders, the back, the legs and the arms," said one inmate, in documents seen by AFP.

Another prisoner described the stench of dead rats, while another said he had to share his cell with up to 300 cockroaches.

 
 

 

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