updated 6:52 p.m. ET Aug. 31, 2005

AIGLE, Switzerland - The editor of the French sports daily L’Equipe denied Tuesday that his newspaper had accused Lance Armstrong of doping because he is American.

“If Lance Armstrong was a French rider and we were in possession of the same information, we would have done the same thing,” Claude Droussent told France’s LCI television station.

L’Equipe reported last week that Armstrong used the banned performance-enhancing drug EPO to help win the 1999 Tour de France — the first of his record seven straight titles.

Armstrong responded by vehemently denying the accusations and claiming he was the victim of a “witch hunt” by L’Equipe. He said the daily’s motivation for running the story simply was “selling newspapers.”

On Aug. 23, L’Equipe reported it had evidence that six of Armstrong’s urine samples from the ’99 Tour tested positive last year for EPO. The substance was banned in 1999, but there was no reliable test at the time.

The International Cycling Union said Monday it will investigate reports of positive drug tests at the ’99 Tour and issue its findings within 10 days.

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Armstrong has said he is considering whether to take the newspaper, France’s national anti-doping laboratory and Tour race director Jean-Marie Leblanc to court. Leblanc said last week that the L’Equipe report means Armstrong “owes explanations to us and to everyone who follows the Tour.”

“For the first time — and these are no longer rumors, or insinuations, these are proven scientific facts — someone has shown me that in 1999, Armstrong had a banned substance called EPO in his body,” Leblanc told the newspaper.

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