PARIS -- The jailing of the late president Francois Mitterrand's son on suspicion of illegal arms trafficking is a disaster for French policy and a political bombshell for Africa, a former senior French security official said on Saturday.

Paul Barril, a former military police head and Africa expert, said the judicial probe launched against Jean-Christophe Mitterrand was only the beginning of a series of revelations that would spread fear and concern among African leaders traditionally close to France.

Mitterrand, his father's adviser to Africa from 1986 to 1992, is being held on suspicion of influence peddling, complicity in arms trafficking and abuse of confidential and company funds in relation to large sales of Russian arms to Angola in the early 1990s.

"This is a bombshell for Africa," Barril told the daily Le Parisien. "We're only at the start of the revelations."

In a hard-hitting editorial, the influential daily Le Monde denounced the secret deals hatched in the Elysee Presidential Palace and carried out in a legal vacuum as "a disgrace for France and for Africa".

Judicial sources said Mitterrand, 54, would spend Christmas in the forbidding Sante Prison in Paris where he was taken on Thursday because judges would take several days to consider a petition for his urgent release filed by his lawyers on Friday.

Nicknamed "Papa-Ma-Dit" (daddy told me) for often referring to his father in conversation, Mitterrand has admitted receiving on his numbered Swiss Bank account 1.8 million dollars from arms deal Pierre Falcone, but he has denied it had anything to do with the 500 million dollar deal.

Barril, who recently published a book "Explosive Inquiry" about arms trafficking in Africa, said seeing Mitterrand jailed was "a catastrophe for French policy, which has already been dumping its ballast on the (African) Continent".

"The people in Africa can't understand it anymore," he said, referring to leaders who dealt confidentially with France for decades. "The heads of state are afraid ... these dossiers implicate accomplices at a very high level."

Barril said selling arms to Angola was a part of France's strategy to assure itself an important chunk of the local oil market. He said France had also arranged secret arms deals with Ivory Coast.

(Reuter)