A convicted British fraudster who featured in a Netflix documentary has been sentenced to six years in prison by a French court after prosecutors said he “deliberately” ran down two police officers while trying to escape.

Robert Hendy-Freegard, also known as David Hendy, is the main protagonist in the documentary “The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman” and the fictional film “Rogue Agent”, both available on Netflix.

He denied deliberately hurting the officers, claiming in a text message read in court that they “jumped in front” of his car.

In 2005, a London court had sentenced Hendy-Freegard to life in prison for kidnapping, deception and stealing from students and women - from whom he took more than a million pounds - while posing as a spy for MI5.

But he was freed in 2009 after an appeals court overturned his conviction for kidnapping on the grounds that there had been no physical constraint, controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate setting, or psychological manipulation, was not a crime in British law at the time. It became so in 2015 but is still not an offence in France.

On Thursday, Hendy-Freegard, now 53, stood trial in the town of Gueret for driving into and injuring two police officers in central France’s sparsely populated Creuse region in August 2022.

He faces up to 10 years if found guilty of “violence against public officials”, which caused them to have to take 21 and six days off work, and a €150,000 fine.

Appearing without a lawyer, Hendy-Freegard told the court: “I made mistakes that day, but you have no idea what I’ve been through even though I’m not a physical victim. But none of this would have happened if the Netflix documentary hadn’t aired.”

When quizzed on why he rammed the two officers, dragging one on the bonnet of the Audi A3 over 32 metres, causing fractures, cuts and bruises, he said: “First of all, I’m sorry I didn’t stop.”

“But I panicked, I had to face three trials before I was convicted. I didn’t stop because I’m a human being with emotions.”

“The person on your car bonnet was also a human,” hit back the judge, Elodie Bouteloup.

Despite the apology, Henry-Freegard said that he no recollection of actually hitting the officers, a man and woman. “That’s one version of events, but it’s not the facts,” he told the court, adding: “There are two sides to every story”.

The court heard that while on the run in Belgium, he had sent a text message to a French gendarme he knew saying: “I just wanted to say that I apologise to your colleagues who jumped in front of me. I’m horrified that they thought I wanted to murder them.”

At the time of the incident, Hendy-Freegard had been living on and off in the nearby village of Vidaillat under a fake name since 2015, illegally breeding dogs, whose barking irked neighbours.

They noticed that while he often left his home for long periods, his then partner Sandra Clifton, who he met on a dating app, always stayed behind to look after the pack of 29 beagles, never leaving the property and barely ever interacting with neighbours.

After doing their own sleuth worth, the neighbours, mostly retirees, discovered Hendy-Freegard’s real name and criminal past online.

They alerted the authorities, who said there was nothing they could do as the woman had not filed a complaint.