Could the French doctor Joël Le Scouarnec have been arrested earlier?

Dr. François Simon was one of the many people who knew that Joël Le Scouarnec had been sentenced to download images of sexual abuse for children in 2005 and continued to operate children as a gastric surgeon.

More than a decade later, the French police arrested Mr. Le Scouarnec. They would eventually load it with the rape or sexual assault of 299 former patients, most of them.

Dr. Simon was the chief of an official council who supervised the doctors in Finistère, Brittany, where Mr. Le Scouarnec was employed in the late 2000s. He was part of several people in the bureaucratic health system carefully of France responsible for attacking the initial criminal conviction of Mr. Le Scouarnec.

Like many, at the end, he dropped the ball. He could have called to a disciplinary hearing, but instead, he sent the verdict to the departmental branch of the Ministry of Health. He told a court this month he believed that the office could remedy more emergency. His own advice voted almost unanimously that the actions of Mr. Le Scouarnec had not violated the code of medical ethics.

“We tried to do what we could,” said Dr. Simon, who is now retired, in a courtroom in Vannes, a port city in Brittany, where he had been summoned as a witness against his will. “I cannot say that there was a dysfunction, but I regret it because there was a misunderstanding.”