“I am a colorful character.” Genevan cheekiness, enormous belly, ponytail and beard, eccentric loner well known in the countryside, the sixty-year-old judged this Monday by the Criminal Court is right: defendants like him are rare. But this voluble good nature hides a dark side, which escaped him.
Declared irresponsible by the psychiatric expert (“serious mental disorder of high severity”), he is accused of being the arsonist who terrorized the Lignon towers from December 2021 to July 2002: during this period, he allegedly started the fire six times in the cellars and twice on the upper floors (without injuries or deaths). In October 2022, a farm and a shed burned in Avully. Added to these facts are three attacks, including one where he allegedly threatened a woman after dousing her with gasoline: “I’m going to burn you, you dirty Ukrainian woman.”
The man, incarcerated for almost two years, now in the Curabilis prison-hospital, wants to be treated. He admits to needing it, says he has already been voluntarily interned, but denies being the author of the fires. “I have lived in the tower for 24 years, I have no interest in setting fire.” The judge suggests to him that his disorder could have led him to forget. He refutes. But it extends over a life that he describes as chaotic: deceased parents, Hungarian gypsy mother prostituted then murdered, childhood in homes, foreign legion. He speaks of “human mass graves” in Africa when he was a soldier and “post-traumatic stress”. He has been at AI for 30 years.
This atypical profile would make him an ideal manager, while at the Tours du Lignon, “delinquency is significant”, judges his lawyer Mr. Pascal Junod. He considers the file “inconsistent”, lacking in evidence. Above all, he emphasizes that the expert noted “no symptoms of pyromania” in his client. Justice would be wrong. Verdict this Tuesday.
Five years of secure care required
The defendant suffers from a serious mental disorder, a bipolar affective disorder and a personality disorder due to a stroke, in particular. “At the time of the events, he did not appreciate the unlawful nature of his actions.” He can therefore “neither be found guilty nor punished,” explained the prosecutor. She required an institutional therapeutic measure in a closed environment “for an initial duration of 5 years”. It seems to him “the only one capable of preserving public safety in view of the very high risk of recidivism.”
