A senior French politician has called for Devil’s Island to be reopened – as a prison for jihadis returning to Europe after travelling abroad to fight.

Nicolas Dupont-Aignan – who stood as a candidate for the French presidency in 2012 – believes that the former penal colony in South America would be a fitting place for ‘the madmen’ who have fought with radical groups such as Islamic State (IS) and Al Qaeda.

The island in French Guiana is notorious as the place where French army officer Alfred Dreyfus was unjustly held at the end of the 19th Century after being accused of treason, and as the location of the 1973 film Papillon, starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.

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Devil's Island in French Guiana, which French politician Nicolas Dupont-Aignan has said would be a fitting place to hold people who have fought with radical groups such as Islamic State and Al Qaeda

Mr Dupont-Aignan – the founder of the right-wing DLF party and an affiliate to the UMP, the party of the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy – admitted the proposal would ‘cause a stir’, but insisted it had widespread support. It is the latest suggested solution for the problem of what to do with returning jihadis. In Britain, there have been demands for extremists to be denied re-entry into the country.

Referring to the official name for Devil’s Island, Mr Dupont-Aignan said he ‘proposes the re-establishment of a Cayenne detention centre which would allow us to permanently isolate the madmen’.

He insisted the regime would not be like that of the original Devil’s Island, where tropical disease, starvation and savage beatings were commonplace, but instead the jail would be run in ‘a humane way’.

Estimates of the number of French nationals in Syria and Iraq range from 1,000 to 4,000. Earlier this month, two of them – Mickael Dos Santos and Maxime Hauchard – appeared in an IS video showing the decapitated bodies of a US aid worker and 18 Syrian soldiers. In the past two years, two returning French jihadis have been connected with 11 murders.

French nationals Mickael Dos Santos, left, and Maxime Hauchard, right, who have appeared in an ISIS video showing the decapitated bodies of a US aid worker and 18 Syrian soldiers

Such atrocities have guaranteed widespread support for Mr Dupont-Aignan’s proposal, with French National Front leader Marine Le Pen saying all returning fighters should be ‘imprisoned for life’.

The fear is they will carry out atrocities in mainland Europe, such as those by Al Qaeda-trained killer Mohammed Merah, who shot dead seven people near Toulouse in 2012, and Mehdi Nemmouche, who faces trial for the murder of four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels earlier this year.

A French Interior Ministry source in Paris told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Faced with these kind of events, it is no surprise that people are calling for drastic measures.’

The French government said it was aware of the proposal but has not made an official response.

The island was the setting for the 1973 film Papillon, which starred Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman

The penal colony closed in 1953 and is now run by the National Centre for Space Studies, a French and European research body.

Air Marshal Sir John Walker, Britain’s former head of defence intelligence, said: ‘If the French are wanting to isolate them and stop them spreading their extremist creed, then you do have to separate the jihadis from the mainstream population. You don’t know how far they have been brainwashed and what they have been taught. But reopening Devil’s Island is a high-risk strategy.’

But Lord Carlile QC, the UK’s former terrorism legislation watchdog, called the proposal ‘bonkers’ and a ‘daft idea that would be unlawful in the United Kingdom’.