AN EAST Lancashire man who was found guilty of killing his wife in France is set for yet another retrial after his conviction was quashed.

Robert Lund, of Darwen, will now face a third trial for killing his second wife Evelyn, 52, and dumping her body in a French lake.

French reports said the guilty verdict handed down in October 2009 had been ‘tainted with blunders’ and was on Thursday overturned by the Cour de Cassation, France’s highest court.

According to La Depeche, the judge made a procedural error at the last trial and one of the translators had been asleep for much of the debate.

Lund had been sentenced to 12 years in prison at each of the previous two trials.

According to his lawyer, Maitre Apollinaire Legros-Gimber, Lund was ‘delighted’ when he heard the news, La Depeche, the regional French newspaper, reported.

But the family of Mrs Lund, from Rossendale, were ‘very angry’, their lawyer told the newspaper.

“The family is preparing for another trial. They have to wait more than 10 years after the events to get a definitive verdict,” Maitre Hervé Rénier said.

The trial, which will start in eight to 12 months, is expected to take place in either the town of Agen or Bordeaux.

The court will be asked to consider the six years Lund has already spent behind bars, his lawyer said.

Mrs Lund went missing from the couple’s farmhouse in the remote village of Rayssac in December 1999. Two years later her body was found, slumped on the back seat of her car in a lake 15 miles away.

Her husband said she never returned home from visiting friends, but prosecutors accused him of covering up her death after a violent row.

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