French court found him guilty of the Closer magazine about Duches Kate Middleton’s topless photos, The lawsuits can take up to in prison

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have won an injunction preventing France’s Closer magazine showing more photos of her sunbathing topless.

The Tribunal de Grande Instance in Nanterre, Paris also ordered Closer to hand over all files of the pictures to the royal couple within 24 hours.

The magazine – which is owned by the Italian publishing group Montedori – was warned it would be fined 10,000 euros (£8,070) a day for each day the injunction was not respected.

The ruling prevents Closer, which ran the pictures on Friday, from reusing them in print or on its website, as well as from selling them to markets where they have not been published.

The pictures are widely available on the Internet and have already been printed in Ireland’s Daily Star newspaper and Italy’s Chi magazine which is also part of Montedori, owned by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

“These snapshots which showed the intimacy of a couple, partially naked on the terrace of a private home, surrounded by a park several hundred meters from a public road, and being able to legitimately assume that they are protected from passers-by, are by nature particularly intrusive,” the French civil court decreed.

“(They) were thus subjected to this brutal display the moment the cover appeared.”

The photos show the Duchess relaxing at a private villa in Provence, in southern France, sometimes without her bikini top and, in one case, her suit bottom partially pulled down to apply sunscreen.

She and Prince William have also initiated criminal proceedings over the images with the aim of getting Closer’s editor and the person or persons who took them put on trial.

A French prosecutor today began a preliminary investigation into the criminal complaint. “Basically, Kate and William have got everything they asked for.”

The developments come after the Irish Daily Star suspended its editor, Michael O’Kane, pending an investigation into the newspaper’s decision to use the pictures on Saturday.

The decision infuriated media mogul Richard Desmond, who jointly owns the Star with INM.

Mr Desmond has said he wants it shut down, with insiders at his company warning: “He says what he means, and means what he says”.

Alan Shatter, the Irish Minister for Justice, Equality and Defence, has said the Republic will introduce privacy laws on the back of the scandal.

The scandal first erupted last week when Closer ran the images of the royal couple enjoying a private holiday at Chateau d’Autet, near Aix-en-Provence.

In an angry response St James’s Palace said in a statement that a red line had been crossed.

William and Kate are currently on a Diamond Jubilee tour of the Far East and South Pacific where they have stopped off at Tuvala, one of the smallest countries in the world.

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