PARIS — A model scout who was likely to be questioned by prosecutors in France for his connections to Jeffrey Epstein was found dead this week in a house near Paris, French officials said Wednesday.

The man, Daniel Siad, was in regular contact with Epstein about a decade ago, according to files released in January by the Justice Department. Their texts suggest that Siad repeatedly tried to connect Epstein, a disgraced financier accused of running a sex-trafficking ring, with people Siad described as female models, including one who he said was 15 and others who were under 18.

Siad later acknowledged his work for Epstein but denied wrongdoing. His body was found Monday in a house in Colombes, a northwestern suburb of Paris, according to the local prosecutor’s office. Authorities are still assessing how Siad died, the prosecutors said.

He was named in February by Laure Beccuau, the chief Paris prosecutor, as “one of the people who could be questioned” as part of a pair of broader inquiries into people connected to Epstein that opened that month. Beccuau said in May that no one had been questioned yet because the investigation was still at an early stage.

In a broadcast interview that month, Siad denied the accusations against him and said he was waiting for justice to take its course.

In that interview, Siad said he had worked as a model scout for 30 years and was introduced to Epstein in the early 2000s.

Over 15 years, Siad connected Epstein to about a dozen models, Siad said. None of them ever gave him “negative feedback” about Epstein, he said. “My relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was strictly professional,” he added.

Siad’s lawyer, Ménya Arab-Tigrine, said Wednesday that her client had “consistently proclaimed his innocence.”

Separately, prosecutors said this year that they had also received a complaint from a Swedish woman accusing Siad of committing “sexual acts that she describes as rape” in 1990 in France.

The woman, a former model named Ebba P. Karlsson, wrote on a website that she co-founded to publicize testimonies from abuse survivors that Siad “raped me in a pool house behind a villa on the French Riviera.” In the May interview, Siad said: “I never raped a woman in my life.”

Siad is the second person connected to Epstein who has been found dead in France. In 2022, Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling agent and Epstein associate who had been charged with the rape of minors, was found dead in his jail cell.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Ségolène Le Stradic/Dept. of Justice
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