内容摘要：Israeli defence sources had earlier confirmed to local journalists that accusations made by the opposition politician Avigdor Lieberman were correct.

Israeli defence sources had earlier confirmed to local journalists that accusations made by the opposition politician Avigdor Lieberman were correct.

Describing how they went about constructing the chairs, the two described in court how Mr Pallot sourced wood frames at various auctions for low prices, while Mr Desnoues aged wood at his workshop to make others.They were then sent for gilding and upholstery, before Mr Desnoues added designs and a wood finish. He added stamps from some of the great furniture-workers of the 18th Century, which were either faked or taken from real furniture of the period.

Once they were finished, Mr Pallot sold them through middlemen to galleries like Kraemer and one he himself worked at, Didier Aaron. They would then get sold onto auction houses such as Sotheby's of London and Drouot of Paris."I was the head and Desnoues was the hands," Mr Pallot told the court smilingly."It went like a breeze," he added. "Everything was fake but the money."

Prosecutors allege the two men made an estimated profit of more than €3m off the forged chairs – though Mr Pallot and Mr Desnoues estimated their profits to be a lower amount of €700,000. The income was deposited in foreign bank accounts, prosecutors said.Lawyers representing Versailles told the BBC that Mr Pallot, a lecturer at the Sorbonne, managed to deceive the institution because of his "privileged access to the documentation and archives of Versailles and the Louvre Museum as part of his academic research".

A statement from lawyer Corinne Hershkovitch's team said that thanks to Mr Pallot's "thorough knowledge" of the inventories of royal furniture recorded as having existed at Versailles in the 18th Century, he was able to determine which items were missing from collections and to then make them with the help of Mr Desnoues.

Mr Desnoues also had access to original chairs he had made copies of, they added, "enabling him to produce fakes that had all the visual appearance of an authentic, up to the inventory numbers and period labels".The results of a consultation by the Law Commission, which proposed re-establishing a national forensic service and making the mishandling of evidence a criminal offence in some circumstances, are set to go before Parliament next week.

From the moment I arrived in Praia da Luz on Monday the word on everyone's lips was "closure".All the long-term residents of the sleepy Atlantic resort told me closure was what they were hoping for. From the English woman who lived at the time above the apartment from which Madeleine McCann disappeared in 2007, to the former neighbour of the main suspect in the case.

They all said: "We hope her family get closure".Of course, any chance of a really positive outcome disappeared years ago. Closure now would mean either finding Madeleine McCann's body, or finding her living with another family, unable to remember her parents or her younger twin siblings.