French justice on Monday sentenced a Malian marabout to 15 years of imprisonment for serial rapes, committed between 2018 and 2020 in the Paris region, on modest women from the West African diaspora.
Sentenced to the maximum penalty, the man, aged around thirty, was found guilty of raping nine victims. He was also convicted of defrauding these women, as well as around fifteen other people, for a total amount of several tens of thousands of euros.
The court followed the requisitions of the attorney general who had mentioned “a very dangerous individual”. “He doesn’t recognize anything. Worse: he says he is the victim of conspiracy, the victim of rape,” Alice Nicalek was indignant in her indictment.
The trial gave rise to a procession at the bar of broken women, all of West African origin, generally housekeepers or housekeepers.
Speaking, between their tears, in Soninké, Pular, Bambara or French, they recounted how Ali Sidibé used their beliefs to lead them to a room in a seedy hotel in Montreuil, in the Paris suburbs.
Some had called on the services of the marabout to heal a sick child or a painful limb. Others had been approached in the street by the marabout who claimed to be able to free them from “jinns” (spirits) who wished them harm. They all ended up harassed, threatened, terrorized.
A divorced mother of six hoped the marabout could remove an obstacle to her marriage to the man she loved. She found herself reduced to the status of a “toy” in the hands of the accused, who allegedly raped her several times and who stripped her of 400 euros per month from her 1,200 euros salary.
“If I didn’t obey what he said, he was going to drive me crazy or curse my children,” reported this 44-year-old maid, having a panic attack at the stand.
During the nine days of hearing, the civil parties’ benches remained almost always deserted. The victims, aged between 40 and 60, came to testify alone, on the sly, only to leave again just as fleetingly.
This case had the particularity that the civil parties found themselves there almost in spite of themselves. Their presence was only due to the tenacity of a police officer who found them based on the accused’s telephone bills and who finally managed to obtain their confidences.
