Romania's former prime minister, Adrian Nastase Nastase, shot himself in the neck on Wednesday in an apparent suicide attempt, hours after the country's highest court ruled that he must serve a two-year prison sentence on corruption charges.

Nastase has insisted that the case against him is politically motivated and indicated he will take it to the European Court of Human Rights.

He has claimed that the sentence was unjust, and that his exhausting eight-year-trial already felt like a prison sentence of its own.