A Frenchman was sentenced to 16 years of criminal imprisonment, Wednesday before the assizes in Versailles, for having raped or sexually assaulted at least 66 underage boys.
A Frenchman was sentenced to 16 years of criminal imprisonment, Wednesday before the assizes in Versailles, for having raped or sexually assaulted at least 66 underage boys in Sri Lanka, Tunisia and Egypt, for ten years.
The sentence of Thierry Darantière, 52, is accompanied by an injunction of care for 10 years.
This verdict, rendered after more than five hours of deliberation, is lower than the requisitions of the prosecution, 18 years imprisonment.
“Nothing saves, everything overwhelms” , launched the Advocate General. “These rapes, by their duration, their frequency, the cynicism (of the accused), the humanitarian context, are outside the norm” , a feeling shared by investigators and civil party associations.
Spotted on the internet in 2011
Judged since Monday, Thierry Darantière acknowledged the facts, without being able to assess the number of his victims or exclude that they could be more numerous.
The FBI had spotted this former director of a Catholic retirement home in Yvelines on the internet in 2011. The French police arrested him the following year.
In the hard drives seized from his home, thousands of photographs and hundreds of videos featuring him with minors, during trips to Tunisia, Egypt and Sri Lanka, where he had visited many times after the 2004 tsunami on behalf of two humanitarian associations.
Cynical and manipulative
In total, over ten years, 41 victims aged 6 to 17 have been recorded in Tunisia, 19 in Sri Lanka, six in Egypt. Only Sri Lanka has cooperated with French justice, allowing names to be put on the faces of nine children.
The accused “did nothing but consume, reduce the children to the status of an object of pleasure (…) and an object of vice” , “a vice whose escalation was only stopped thanks to to his arrest, ” said the Advocate General.
Some abuses “come close to” acts of torture and barbarism, he added. Tuesday, the boss of the specialized police service who arrested him had described a “gradation” in the images, “things that we had never seen . “
“Cynical” , “manipulator” , Thierry Darantière “made a blanket with his humanitarian commitment” , said the prosecution. The applicant denies for his part having used these activities, his “pride” , to approach children.
He who had described himself as “bisexual of a pedophile nature” in front of the police tried to explain his actions by a “quest for his sexual orientation” , against a background of repressed homosexuality in a practicing Catholic family. An argument “absolutely inadmissible” , according to the prosecution.
“Hateful, degrading” acts
“One day pedophile, always pedophile? “ Asked his lawyer, Me Frédéric Champagne, by trying to demonstrate the ” work “ of recognition of the facts carried out by his client, ” fallen into the ease “ offered in these countries by child prostitution.
“He self-destructs expresses what he knows to be an absolute crime . “ “He recognized, completely, four years later. Don’t you think he got it? “
Thierry Darantière conceded a “total lack of discernment” in the face of prostituted minors who approached him or that a tout brought him, a “physical and moral” constraint : “My actions exceeded my will. “ The man was convicted in 2000 in France one year suspended sentence for violations of minors in Austria in 1994.
” And after? » Asked Me Emmanuel Daoud for Ecpat, civil party alongside La Voix de l’Enfant and Act against child prostitution. “What’s going to happen” to these boys? “Bulimia, anorexia, deep depression?” ” ” Sometimes it goes as far as suicide, especially when there is no support. “
Invited to speak for the last time, Thierry Darantière reiterated, a broken voice in the box of the accused, his “deepest apologies” to his victims and their families for his “cowardly, odious, degrading” acts . According to his lawyer, he will not appeal.
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