A married couple who made a porn video at a sombre World War I memorial were last night accused of insulting the memory of heroic soldiers.

The pair - who posted the explicit film on the internet - have been convicted of exhibitionism by a court in France.

They stripped naked and filmed themselves having sex at the Vimy Memorial, near Arras, which pays tribute to hundreds of Canadian soldiers who fell at the 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge.

Sordid: The Vimy Memorial, near Arras in France, where the couple filmed their steamy sex session before posting it on the internet

Sordid: The Vimy Memorial, near Arras in France, where the couple filmed their steamy sex session before posting it on the internet



The man and wife in their 30s then charged people to watch their steamy session on a lurid website.

They were both given four-month suspended prison sentences, fined £400 each and ordered to pay a symbolic one euro (80p) in damages to Canada, which lost 60,000 troops in the Great War.

And last night a spokesman for the French government's war veterans ministry said: 'We are shocked at the latest profound insult to some of the bravest men the world has ever seen.'

The imposing monument - which was unveiled in 1936 by King Edward VIII - is set in a park granted in perpetuity to Canada and attracts half a million visitors a year.

But in recent years the memorial - two huge stone obelisks visibile for miles - had become popular as a site used for public sex acts, local police said.

Six months ago another couple were fined for taking nude photos of themselves at the same memorial, though it is not known if those pictures were uploaded to the net.

Similar sordid incidents have been reported at other war memorials in the battlefields of the Somme in northern France.

A police spokesman said: 'There are always people out there who are set on abusing and disrespecting war memorials, but until now it has usually been in the form of racist graffiti.

'But now there seems to be a rise in the the number of people who seem to take some kind of perverse pleasure in performing sex acts at sensitive sites that should be shown the utmost respect.'

At the trial of the couple in the latest porn film outrage, prosecutor Eise Bozzolo said: 'The memorial has been known for a long time as a place where exhibitionism and voyeurism is common.

'What this couple did is the most vulgar insult to all the men who died for their countries during that war.'

Every year, police in the Somme investigate dozens of incidents of vandalism and desecration of the region's war memorials, which pay tribute to the millions of British and Allied troops who died in the 1914-18 war.

In one of the worst examples in July 2006, thugs demanding an end to the Iraq war daubed foul slogans on a memorial in to British and American troops in Etaples.

They painted a Swastika and wrote in bright red paint, 'Saddam Hussein will win and spill your blood' and 'Death to the Yankees'.

Last year, vandals smashed the headstones of ten British soldiers at the Hibers Trench cemetery near Arras, trampled flowers and left the ground strewn with chunks of shattered masonry.

