PARIS, Dec. 1 (UPI) -- A French appeals court Thursday acquitted six people accused of pedophilia, in a case that sparked an apology from a French public prosecutor.
Those acquitted included a 67-year-old priest, Dominique Wiel, and five other people originally implicated in an alleged pedophilia ring that roiled France.
But the case has since been labeled a disastrous example of injustice, as a key plaintiff in the case later retracted her accusations.
Ultimately, 13 out of 17 people accused of pedophilia were found innocent. Seven of them had been acquitted on a previous occasion.
Earlier, a French public prosecutor apologized for what he described as a "dysfunctioning of the judicial institution."
"There is not question of examining individual responsibilities," said the prosecutor, Yves Bot, told the court Wednesday as he called for the six defendants to be acquitted. "But it's no longer possible to assume a priori that all this is the fault of one, two or three people."
