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PARIS: A French appeals court has acquitted a rapper of libeling police in a case brought by the Interior Ministry that dragged out for six years, the entertainer's lawyer said Wednesday.

Mohamed Bourokba, who performs under the name Hame, accused police of killing ethnic Arabs and abusing other immigrants in the country's slums. The comments were contained in a magazine that accompanied an album issued in 2002 by his group, La Rumeur.

"It was an attempt at censure," attorney Dominique Tricaud said of the case.

Bourokba was not immediately available for comment.

The case brought against Hame was authorized by current President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was the interior minister at the time.

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Among other things, Bourokba, of Algerian origin, wrote that official Interior Ministry reports will never mention "hundreds of our brothers killed by police without any of the killers ever having to answer for it."

The court described those words as "violent and general criticism," but said that "precise events" were not evoked and that the criticism could be applied "in a period of a half-century to security forces for events ... be they part of history or today's news."

As others have done, the rapper also complained about discrimination against people living in the heavily immigrant housing projects ringing France's big cities, areas that erupted in riots in two years ago.

"The reality is that to live today in our neighborhoods is to increase the chance of economic abandon, hiring discrimination, unsure housing, regular humiliation by police," Bourokba wrote.

There, too, the court deemed the rapper did not make a specific accusation but rather took "an inventory of factors aggravating the sense of insecurity in the (housing projects), including regular police humiliation."

Other French rap groups have been taken to court for allegedly offending police with their lyrics or egging restless youths in the suburbs toward disrespect for the nation and its symbols. Most have avoided punishment.

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Associated Press writer Pierre-Antoine Souchard contributed to this report.






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