Joshua French
Norwegian-born security contractor and former soldier
Joshua Olav Daniel Hodne French (born 7 April 1982) is a Norwegian-British man who was convicted of murder in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He worked as a security contractor with his friend Tjostolv Moland when they were arrested in May 2009, and he was later convicted of attempted murder, armed robbery, the formation of a criminal association and espionage for Norway, of which he and Moland were found guilty and sentenced to death. In 2014 he was also convicted of the murder of Moland. He was released in 2017 after serving 8 years of his sentence, and returned to Norway.
The trial caused controversy in Norway and Europe, as his mother claimed a lack of physical evidence, and "a clear economic motive from the Congolese government".
Biography
Early life
Joshua French grew up in the municipality of Re in Norway's Vestfold county. His mother is Norwegian and his father is British. French has dual Norwegian and British citizenship.
French served in the Norwegian Armed Forces until 2006 and was also trained as a paratrooper in the British Army. In 2006, he was admitted to the Telemark Battalion, the Norwegian Army's elite infantry unit, but was fired in 2007 when he and Moland were accused of having recruited military personnel into employment with private security companies.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Joshua French” as norwegian-born security contractor and former soldier. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 9, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q14623521. VIAF identifies the subject as 187387794. The Library of Congress control number is no2011151945. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982, 2009, 2014 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joshua French” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.