A retired accountant whose daughter was killed 27 years ago was facing charges last night over the alleged abduction of the man he always blamed for her death. The man was left bound, gagged and injured outside a French courtroom.

André Bamberski, 72, is suspected of taking justice into his own hands over the German authorities’ failure to act against Dieter Krombach, a German cardiologist, after a French court convicted him of manslaughter in his absence.

Mr Krombach, 74, was found trussed up with head injuries in a lane near the criminal court in the eastern city of Mulhouse on Sunday after an anonymous caller with an Eastern European accent tipped off police. Mr Bamberski, who is of Polish origin and lives near Toulouse, was in Mulhouse at the weekend and is suspected of making the call, police said.

They were trying to determine whether he carried out the kidnapping or whether accomplices or supporters were responsible.

In 1995, the Paris assizes court sentenced Mr Krombach to 15 years in jail for the unintentional killing in 1982 of Kalinka Baberski, 14, with the injection of a toxic substance. The girl had been visiting her mother who was living with Mr Krombach in the Bavarian town of Lindau.

The German authorities refused to extradite Mr Krombach because courts there had ruled that the cause of Kalinka’s death was unknown. In 1997, in another case, he was convicted of sexually abusing a female patient. Mr Bamberski was convinced that Mr Krombach had killed his daughter in an attempt to rape her. He campaigned in the courts and the media until French judges ordered the exhumation of Kalinka’s body.

This led to the Paris trial in 1995 in which Mr Krombach was convicted of “deliberate violence leading to death without the intention of killing”. François Gibault, Mr Bamberski’s lawyer, said: “He never gave up in the face of the inertia of the justice system. He is a brave, determined man but this manhunt had become an obsession. He had nothing left to lose.” Robert Pince, the head of a campaign group set up by Mr Bamberski, said he believed that the girl’s father tried to deliver the cardiologist to the courts. “Of course I suspect Bamberski of trying to bring Krombach back to France, even if I cannot say so for certain,” he said. “André Bamberski is a very religious man. He does not want revenge, he wants justice.”

Mr Kombach, who is legally a fugitive, is likely to be held in France to face a new trial. Under French law, in absentia cases are always retried if the defendant is arrested.

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