Retrospective 2024 in the Gers: the resounding trials which marked the year

14 years in prison for the rape of his stepdaughter

A thirty-year-old man was tried on May 24 and 25 by the Gers criminal court for incestuous rape committed over 6 years against his minor stepdaughter.

For six years, this professional mason took advantage of the young girl, between the ages of 11 and 16. Under “emotional influence”, the teenager, then on the benches of high school in her final year, ends up breaking down in front of her classmates and frees her speech.

The man was arrested in August 2021 and quickly confessed. “She agreed,” he defends himself to investigators. And goes so far as to put himself in the shoes of a victim. His daughter-in-law would have taken the first step “by joining him in his room”. Manuel would “only give in to the advances or attacks” of the teenager.

The Gers criminal court found the 30-year-old guilty of raping his stepdaughter and sentenced him to 14 years of criminal imprisonment.

A Gers soldier stabs his superior 9 times

Tried for attempted murder of a superior, a 38-year-old former Gers soldier was sentenced to 9 years' imprisonment by the Cayenne Assize Court specializing in military matters on Tuesday October 15. The former Gers soldier had stabbed Commander Franck Ramblado nine times in his office.

The deputy senior officer had been rescued by three soldiers, the commander, the chancellor and the secretary of the command post, who had stopped the arm of his attacker. The Auscitain soldier decided to appeal this conviction.

55,000 bottles stolen: not a penny for Château Montus

On October 13, 2022, 13 individuals had to answer for their actions before the Auch judicial court. The heads of prevention? A colossal theft in the warehouses of Alain Brumont's cellar. 55,000 bottles of wine (including the famous Château Montus and Bouscassé) were stolen before being resold “at a discount”. The damage was estimated at more than one million euros. The thieves and receivers had to explain themselves in court.

Among the defendants, the person responsible for expeditions at Château Bouscassé.

On December 8, 2022, the sentence falls. Two café managers, in Auch and Maubourguet (65), were released. The person responsible for the thefts, the former head of shipments, received a 3-year prison sentence, two of which were suspended, with a fixed portion subject to change.

One of the receivers, having confessed to nearly €26,000 in profits from the trafficking of stolen cases of wine, was sentenced to 6 months in prison with home detention under an electronic bracelet. For the others, the court requested a simple stay. The thief's wife got 2 years, the other defendants were sentenced to sentences ranging from 3 months to 18 months.

Two years later, in 2024, the Auscitain court ruled on the civil aspect and its deliberations were surprising. For the material damage suffered, the owner of the domain will not receive a single cent.

The vineyard owner's civil action was deemed admissible by the court. Alain Brumont is indeed a victim of theft. However, the court ruled that he had insufficiently characterized his damage. In other words, he did not prove the reality of the losses suffered, even if customs participated in quantifying them.

The Alain Brumont company, accompanied by its lawyer Me Alain Nonnon, has decided to appeal this decision.

Sentenced 20 years later for a bank robbery

After 16 years on the run, Radosav Mastrapovic was sentenced to 5 years in prison by the Pau criminal court for his participation in bank robberies in 2004 in Pavie and Pontacq in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Until the end of the trial, he denied having had a key role in the series of robberies which took place in 2004 in Béarn and Gers.

On Wednesday September 18, the verdict fell at the Pau Assize Court, after three days of hearing, interrogations, reading of reports and testimony. The one nicknamed “Yougo” or “Tony the Younger”, Radosav Mastrapovic, 64 years old, was found guilty. Damage from these armed robberies: €145,000 in total.

At the time, it only took investigators a few weeks to arrest 5 suspects at the end of 2004, including Franco-Serb Radosav Mastrapovic. In 2008, all were convicted and imprisoned. Released under judicial supervision, Mastrapovic took the opportunity to leave for Serbia. Under an international arrest warrant, he was caught by the courts in 2023 before being extradited to France.

A man convicted of rapes committed between 1988 and 1998 against his niece

On December 20, the Gers Assize Court sentenced Guy C. to 5 years in prison, including three years suspended for rape of his niece.

After six years of denials, Guy C. admitted the facts that day in court. “I am guilty,” he declared before the judges and jurors. Between 1988 and 1998, he was the perpetrator of rape on his niece when she was between 7 and 17 years old.

A particularity of this hearing is that it took nearly 30 years for the victim to overcome her shame, to dare to cross the door of a gendarmerie, and six more years for a trial to begin.

Between 1988 and 1998, the victim was between 7 and 17 years old. She told the police in 2018 what she suffered at the time. When she was 7 years old, she recounts the time she slept at the house of the man who is, in addition to her uncle, also her godfather. “He asked me to join him in bed, he started to caress me. I felt he wanted to penetrate me but it wasn't with his hand. I pushed him away and he asked me not to say anything. »

But 36 years after the first alleged facts, can we judge the accused? The question arose after a first complaint filed in 2016. Answer? No. The public prosecutor dismisses the case at the end. The facts having first been qualified as sexual assault, the case was time-barred (the time limit being 20 years in this case, Editor's note).

But the victim does not want to stop there. The following year, she filed a new complaint, with the constitution of a civil party, which allowed the opening of a judicial investigation into rapes. The victim maintains all her statements and on June 17, 2019, the uncle is indicted. For acts of rape, the statute of limitations is increased to 30 years.

The hearing was punctuated by intense and testing debates, as well as tensions. In the audience, emotion was at its peak. Some family members, overwhelmed by pain or tension, were unable to hold back their tears, while a relative of the accused collapsed, requiring the intervention of the firefighters.

After two days of trial on December 19 and 20, and while the accused finally admitted the facts, 36 years after the first touching of his 7-year-old niece, the Assize Court declared him guilty and sentenced him to 5 years of imprisonment. prison including 3 years with a probationary suspension.

The sixty-year-old will therefore not go to prison, the firm sentence being flexible. This trial with its unique content gave the public prosecutor the opportunity to recall that “the rapist can also be the neighbor, the father, the grandfather or the uncle”