SOISSONS(National Times)- A French court on Thursday convicted a man of involuntary manslaughter after the pit bull he had illegally imported and trained to bite mauled to death his pregnant girlfriend.

The court in the northern town of Soissons handed Christophe Ellul, 51, a suspended four-year sentence, and ordered the dog put down.

Ellul in November 2019 found his girlfriend dead in a forest outside the town, her body covered with 50 bites.

Elisa Pilarski, a 29-year-old who was six months pregnant, had been out walking their two-year-old dog, an American pit bull terrier named Curtis. Minutes before she died, she had called him at work at an airport outside Paris some 50 kilometres (30 miles) away to say she had been bitten and she could not control their dog, the investigation showed.

It is illegal in France to import pit bulls, which have been classified as dangerous.

Ellul long argued that his dog, which he brought from the Netherlands, was not aggressive. He said that hounds taking part in a deer hunt in the forest must have been responsible. But DNA tests showed that the culprit was the pit bull.

Sixty-two hunting hounds and the couple’s other five dogs were also tested to exclude their involvement.

The dog Curtis, now aged eight and a half, has spent more than six years locked up in a kennel since the incident.

Animal activists have called for his pardon, with one petition on change.org with more than 80,000 signatures urging Curtis instead be transferred to an animal shelter.