A French former surgeon on trial for sexually abusing nearly 300 of his patients, most under 15, on Friday described how he also preyed on the children who came to his home.

Joel Le Scouarnec, 74, has been on trial in the western city of Vannes since last week in one of the country’s largest child sex abuse cases.

He is charged with assaulting or raping 299 patients, many while under anaesthesia or waking up after operations, at a dozen hospitals between 1989 and 2014.

Le Scouarnec on Friday also admitted to raping S., a friend of his children.

The woman, who AFP is not naming as she was a child at the time of the alleged crime, told a court in western France of the abuse she suffered in the early 1990s during visits to the Le Scouarnec household.

When she was six the doctor took her into a bedroom and “raped” her while her mother and the doctor’s wife chatted in the living room, she said.

A few weeks later, he followed her into the bathroom and digitally raped her.

Several months after that, he tried to isolate her again but she managed to run away back to her mother.

Le Scouarnec, who has claimed not to remember many of the acts with which he has been charged, said he remembered the “bathroom episode”.

“I’d make the most of (one of my sons) bringing friends (home) to abuse them,” he said.

That day, “I was on the lookout for an opportunity and there, I saw little S. go to the toilet. So I went to the toilet to commit the acts as I described them.”

The surgeon was never investigated during his career despite a 2005 sentence for owning sexually abusive images of children.

He continued to work until his retirement in 2017, after which a six-year-old accused him of rape and police discovered diary accounts of abuse stored on his computers.

In court, Le Scouarnec explained how he had hoped that speaking as little as possible during the abuse would discourage children from speaking up about it.

“I only thought about myself,” he said.

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