Agence France-Presse reports the prosecutor wants four other people to stand trial, including Diack's former adviser, Habib Cissé, and former IAAF anti-doping director Gabriel Dolle.

It has been recommended both men should be charged with "passive corruption".

Investigating magistrate Renaud Van Ruymbeke has three months to decide whether the case should go to trial.

The French probe began in November 2015 when Lamine Diack, who was the IAAF President from 1999 to 2015, was placed under formal investigation on suspicion of corruption and money laundering.

He had been accused of receiving bribes to cover up doping violations by Russian athletes.

France's financial prosecutor has alleged that Senegalese Papa Massata Diack, a former IAAF marketing consultant, had been at the heart of a corruption scheme in international sports – an accusation he has denied.

Papa Massata Diack was banned for life by the IAAF in January 2016, alongside Valentin Balakhnichev, the former President of the Russian Athletics Federation and treasurer of the IAAF, and Alexei Melnikov, the former senior coach of Russia's athletics team.

It came after he was charged in relation to payments totalling around £435,000 ($554,000/€496,000) made by Russia's Liliya Shobukhova, the 2010 London Marathon winner and a three-time Chicago Marathon champion, in order to cover up doping violations. 

Papa Massata Diack is also linked to the corruption case that led to Tsunekazu Takeda resigning as an International Olympic Committee (IOC) member in March.

Takeda, who is also set to step down as Japanese Olympic Committee President next month, is being investigated in France for "active corruption". 

It concerns payments worth $2 million (£1.6 million/€1.8 million) made to Singaporean company Black Tidings before Tokyo was awarded the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics at the IOC Session in Buenos Aires in 2013.

The account holder has been closely tied to Papa Massata Diack.

Last month, the IAAF closed an ethics investigation into current President Sebastian Coe after the world governing body found there was no basis on which "any disciplinary case could be established" that he had misled a British Parliamentary Committee over his knowledge of corruption and doping in Russia.

Coe was questioned by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Select Committee in December 2015, four months after being elected IAAF President, about the case.

Members of Parliament asked the Briton about an email he had forwarded without reading, containing allegations on Shobukhova.

Sent by former world 10,000 metres record holder David Bedford, the email documented how Shobukhova had allegedly paid bribes in return for the covering up of positive drugs tests.

Coe, a double Olympic 1,500m gold medallist, insisted he did not know the specific detail of it.

Although he confirmed receiving the email, he said he had forwarded it to the IAAF Ethics Board without reading the attachments.

The IAAF said in a statement, however, that the investigation into the matter had "not identified evidence of a potential breach of the Code of Ethics" by Coe.

In its final report, entitled Combating Doping in Sport, the DCMS Select Committee asserted that Coe's answers had been "misleading" and that he had "sought to distance himself from any knowledge of the allegations of doping in Russian athletics" before the broadcast of an ARD documentary on doping.

It concluded by claiming how "these are matters of the greatest seriousness and affect the reputation of both the IAAF and Lord Coe".

The section of the report on athletics and the IAAF focuses on the period when Coe was vice-president to his predecessor as President, Lamine Diack.

insidethegames has contacted the IAAF for comment.