A former French senator has been found guilty of spiking an MP’s drink with ecstasy in order to sexually assault her.

Joel Guerriau received a four-year prison sentence – 18 months of which are to be served behind bars – and, according to local media, was ordered to pay Sandrine Josso €5,000 (£4,348) in damages for emotional distress.

Guerriau, now 68, had invited Josso, 50, to his Paris flat in November 2023. He later admitted serving her a drink spiked with MDMA, but maintained it was an accident and denied having any intention of assaulting her.

Shortly after the verdict on Tuesday, Josso said it was a “huge relief”, AFP reports. Meanwhile, Guerriau’s lawyers said he would appeal.

According to court documents quoted by French media, Josso said she had gone to Guerrieau’s home three years ago to celebrate his re-election when she started feeling unwell after drinking from a champagne glass.

“I had gone to visit a friend and I discovered an aggressor,” she said on Monday while giving evidence in the trial.

“He looked at me insistently, I’d never seen him that way. I didn’t want to show him my weakness, because I was worried that if I told him I wasn’t feeling well, he would’ve forced me to lie down.”

Josso recalled managing to leave the flat and, with the help of a colleague, went to hospital where a toxicology report confirmed her blood had three times the recreational dose of MDMA.

Guerriau told the court he had been going through a period of depression, and had meant to take the drug himself the night before. He did not end up doing so and accidentally offered the glass containing MDMA to Josso the following evening, he said.

“I feel sorry for Sandrine,” Guerriau told the court in Paris. “I am disgusted with myself, with my recklessness and my stupidity.”

He added: “We don’t talk about the effects of these drugs enough… All I want is to speak out on the dangers of these products.”

Asked about the several internet searches he made around ecstasy and the drug GHB, he said he had no recollection.

“I was on the train, thoughts and ideas just come to you,” he told the court, adding government members needed to show an interest in “all current events”.

Guerriau, a centre-right senator from the Horizons party, was suspended when the charges against him came to light. He resigned as a senator last October.

Josso, who is still an MP for the centre-right MoDem, has become a staunch campaigner against so-called chemical submission – drug-facilitated sexual assault.

“What I went through is still very painful,” Josso said, speaking to French media ahead of the trial beginning.

“Psychological trauma feels like being frozen in time… I jump at the slightest thing. I’ve become very vulnerable.”

Josso has gone on to join an association against chemical submission, set up by Caroline Darian – the daughter of Dominique Pelicot, who in 2024 was found guilty of drugging his wife Gisele and inviting men to rape her in their home for over a decade.

Josso was often in court during the Pelicot trial. This week, Darian and her brother David attended the proceedings in the Guerriau case.

“My friends are all like me. We all know someone who was killed in the protests.”

For Parisa, a 29-year-old from Tehran, the crackdown by security forces in Iran earlier this month was unlike anything she had witnessed before.

“In the most widespread previous protests, I didn’t personally know a single person who had been killed,” she said.

Parisa said she knew at least 13 people who had been killed since protests over worsening economic conditions erupted in the capital on 28 December and then evolved into one of the deadliest periods of anti-government unrest in the history of the Islamic Republic.

With one human rights group reporting that the number of people confirmed killed has passed 6,000, several young Iranians able speak to the BBC in recent days, despite a near-total internet shutdown, have described the personal toll.

Parisa said one 26-year-old woman she knew was killed by “a hail of bullets in the street” when the protests escalated across the country on Thursday, 8 January, and Friday, 9 January, and authorities responded with lethal force to crush them.

She herself took part in protests in the north of Tehran that Thursday, which she insisted were peaceful.

“No-one was violent and no-one clashed with the security forces. But on Friday night they still opened fire on the crowd,” she said.

“The smell of gunpowder and bullets filled the neighbourhoods where clashes were taking place.”

Mehdi, 24, who is also from Tehran, echoed her assessment of the scale of the protests and violence.

“I had never seen anything even close to this level of turnout and such killings and violence by the security forces,” he said.

“Despite the killings on Thursday [8 January] and threats of more killings on Friday, people came out, because many of them could no longer endure it and had nothing left to lose,” he added.

Mehdi described witnessing multiple killings of protesters at close range by security forces.

“I saw a young man killed right in front of my eyes with two live rounds,” he said.

“Motorcyclists shot a young man in the face with a shotgun. He fell on the spot and never got back up.”

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (Hrana) says it has so far confirmed the killing of at least 6,159 people since the unrest began, including 5,804 protesters, 92 children and 214 people affiliated with the government. It is also investigating 17,000 more reported deaths.

Skylar Thompson, from Hrana, told the BBC the confirmed number of dead was very likely to rise.

“We are really committed to ensuring that every single piece of verified information that we report on sits next to a name and a location,” she added.

Another group, Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR), has warned that the final toll could exceed 25,000.

Iranian authorities said last week that more than 3,100 people had been killed, but that the majority were security personnel or bystanders attacked by “rioters”.

Most international news organisations, including the BBC, are barred from reporting inside Iran. But videos showing security forces firing live ammunition at crowds have been verified by the BBC.

Sahar, a 27-year-old from the capital, said she knew seven people who had been killed.

She described how the security forces’ response to the unrest escalated rapidly on 8 January.

During a protest that evening, Sahar and her friends sought refuge in a nearby house after tear gas was fired.

“My friend stuck his head out of a window to see what was going on and they shot him in the neck,” she said.

Another friend was wounded by pellets and later bled to death after avoiding going to hospital out of fear of being detained, according to Sahar.

Sahar said a third friend died while being detained by the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC).

“They [officers] told his family to come to the IRGC intelligence office. After a few days they rang and said, ‘Come and collect the body.'”

On 9 January, Sahar said, live ammunition was fired openly and “without mercy” by uniformed security personnel.

“They were pointing lasers at people, and locals were opening their car park doors for us to hide,” she said.

The communications blackout compounded the trauma.

“Right now there’s no news at all,” Sahar said. “Without internet or phone lines we had no idea what was happening to anyone. We could barely get calls through just to get bits of news.”

Parham, 27, described widespread use of pellet guns by security forces in Tehran, particularly targeting protesters’ faces and eyes.

One of his friends, Sina, 23, was shot in the forehead and eye on 9 January.

“We took him to a hospital, but the doctor could only give us a prescription and told us to leave as soon as possible,” Parham said.

At an eye hospital, he added, wounded protesters arrived constantly.

“Every 10 minutes, it felt like they were bringing in someone else who had been hit by a pellet.”

A worker at the hospital’s cafe said she had seen “70 people with eye injuries come in during a single shift”, according to Parham.

Sina – who still has pellets stuck behind one of his eyes and in his forehead – said they had been scared of being arrested at the first hospital because of the need to give their ID numbers, so they had gone to a private eye hospital.

He said he was “lucky” compared to the others who he saw at the eye hospital, who had “pellets all over their faces and in both of their eyes”.

The BBC has seen a medical document in Sina’s name that says “there is a 5mm metallic foreign body” behind his eye.

The medical records of a number of other protesters with pellet-gun wounds have also been received and verified by the BBC.

Protesters and activists have also described a pattern of refusal by the authorities to hand over the bodies of those killed to their families.

Mehdi said his friend’s cousin was killed and that the family was told by officials to either pay a large sum of money to receive his body or agree to him being recorded as a member of the security forces.

“They said, ‘Either pay 1 billion tomans [more than $7,000; £5,000] for us to hand over the body to the family, or you have to say he was a member of the Basij and was martyred for public security and against the riots.'”

Navid, a 38-year-old from Isfahan, also said two close friends whose relatives were killed had received such an ultimatum.

“They say you have to pay the equivalent of several thousand dollars or let us issue them a Basij card so they are counted among the security forces’ dead,” he cited his friends as saying.

Human rights groups have warned that this practice has served both to punish protesters’ families and obscure the true death toll.