JUSTICE – This is a colossal investigation, commensurate with the number of people potentially involved. The commissioner in charge of the titanic case of the Mazan rapes, a case that has been tried since Monday before the Vaucluse criminal court in Avignon, detailed this Wednesday, September 4, the long and tedious work of investigators to find Gisèle P’s attackers. This woman, now 72 years old, was abused by dozens of strangers recruited on the internet by her husband, who drugged her.
Chemical submission at heart of trial of 51 men accused of raping a woman drugged by her husband
“It all started with the vigilance of security personnel at a supermarket in Carpentras”explained before the court the divisional commissioner Jérémie Bosse Platière, now director of the interdepartmental police (DIPN) of the Hautes-Alpes, https://twitter.com/MarionDub/status/1831230686809735394 an RMC journalist present at the trial.
The case actually begins on September 12, 2020, almost by chance, with the arrest of Dominique P., the victim’s husband, who has just filmed under the skirts of customers in the store. Searches are carried out. The man’s mobile and computer data are frozen so that he cannot delete anything.
Investigators then discovered thousands of photos and videos in which his wife, unconscious and inert, was raped by strangers. The acts began in July 2011, when the couple still lived in the Paris region, and continued from March 2013 to October 2020, after their move to Mazan, a charming village near Mont Ventoux.
Dominique P. filed the facts in a file ” abuse “
After having counted some 200 rapes on the victim, most by her husband himself, the investigators finally drew up a list of 72 individuals remaining to be identified, explained Jérémie Bosse Platière. The challenge is to find the perpetrators, but also to ensure that there are no other victims among their wives or relatives, according to the journalist’s account. https://twitter.com/MarionDub/status/1831235191425147153.
Given the scale of the number of people suspected, the police will have to spread their arrests into five waves, between the end of 2020 and September 2021. At that time, 50 men were formally identified, in addition to the husband. Aged 26 to 74, they are sitting in the dock at the Avignon trial alongside Dominique P., 71. All risk up to 20 years in prison.
In their work, the judicial police are greatly assisted by the thousands of photos and videos taken by the husband, recorded on a hard drive and then meticulously described and classified in a file. ” abuse “. With a subfolder for each man who came to rape his wife. “156 files, with nearly 3,800 photos and videos of the facts […] With for example a sub-folder “night of 29/11 with Quentin” »reports journalist Marion Dubreuil.
“A list will then be drawn up for each individual based on the name of the file”the commissioner specifies. Objective: to identify “Chris the Fireman”, « Quentin », « Gaston » or « David le Black ».
Telephone operators and facial recognition
At the same time, the police are using the numerous traces left by the countless telephone exchanges and online conversations between the husband and his wife’s attackers.
“We will start with the telephone numbers (on Dominique P.’s telephone bills) and look at each date to see if there is a link between the call made and the facts found.” on the images, says Jérémie Bosse Platière. Dominique P. had also blocked many contacts on his phones, arousing the suspicions of investigators. “It’s unusual, we see that a large number of contacts are blocked, and we think that some people in the group would be affected” by the rapes, the police officer continues. To trace the identities of these men, investigators are contacting telephone operators, “a job that will last almost two years”.
Another method is to extract the images found and use facial recognition via software used by the national police: “From the extraction of the photo, this will give us a resemblance rate. This will allow us to identify a third of the authors”explains Jérémie Bosse Platière.
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