A British conman who was the subject of a Netflix documentary has been sentenced by a French court to six years in prison after he was found guilty of injuring two police officers.
Robert Hendy-Freegard, 53, had moved to a rural area of central France to breed beagles illegally under a false name.
Hendy-Freegard was found guilty after a trial and sentenced for injuring police officers during an incident on 25 August 2022 at his home in isolated Creuse.
The trial at the court of Gueret, near Limoges, heard on Thursday that Hendy-Freegard, who was addressed in court as David Hendy, rammed two police officers as he fled police questioning at his home in the village of Vidaillat, where he had been illegally breeding dogs, local radio station Ici Creuse reported.
The conman, who posed as a spy for Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5 in order to defraud his victims, is the central figure in the Netflix documentary The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman.
In 2005, a London court sentenced him to life in prison for 20 offences of theft, deception and “kidnapping by fraud”.
An eight-month trial heard at the time that Hendy-Freegard had commandeered the lives of a string of unsuspecting men and women during a decade-long charade that began when he worked as a barman at the Swan pub in Newport, Shropshire, in 1993.
There, he befriended a number of students from Harper Adams Agricultural College and, following the suicide of an Irish student, began to pretend that he was a policeman or agent sent to investigate an IRA cell at the college.
Among his eight victims was student John Atkinson, who handed over more than £300,000 to pay for so-called “protection” from IRA terrorists. Fellow student Sarah Smith parted with more than £200,000.
But in 2009, Hendy-Freegard was released from prison after an appeals court overturned his conviction for the offences of kidnapping by fraud, which alleged that two of his victims were effectively deprived of their liberty by his deception and brainwashing.
Hendy-Freegard, who represented himself during his trial in Gueret, has also been disqualified from driving for five years, and banned from residing in Creuse for the same period of time, the spokesperson for the French Ministry of Justice said.
He was also sentenced to pay damages to the victims.
He has 10 days to appeal against the court’s decision.
