This past September, French authorities arrested and indicted a homeless Congolese national for the rape of three vulnerable people: a 12-year-old child, and two elderly Alzheimer’s patients, aged 68 and 78, who were being treated at a hospital in Nanterre. The degree of the Parisian hospital’s complicity through blatant negligence to follow up on security measures is now under examination.
One of the victims, a 78-year-old patient who was raped in late July at the Max-Fourestier hospital in the western Parisian suburb of Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine), has filed a complaint against the medical facility for endangering her life as well as the life of the other victim who had been under the care of the establishment at the time, the Paris-based newspaper Le Figaro reports.
The former patient’s complaint, according to the news agency AFP, was filed sometime in early November. Subsequently, an investigation was opened and assigned to the Brigade for the Repression of Personal Crime (BRDP), the prosecutor’s office of Nanterre said.
“The victim and her daughter had alerted the hospital before the events about a security defect: an emergency exit opened from the outside when it should not have [been],” Amelle Bouchareb, the lawyer for the plaintiff, said.
“Health establishments have an obligation of surveillance, all the more crucial as they serve the vulnerable. It is a scandal in terms of security,” said Ouadie Elhamamouchi, another lawyer for the plaintiff.
The 27-year-old Congolese suspect is believed to have raped the two elderly patients on the morning of July 27th, thirty minutes apart from one another. At the time of the attacks, the two women had been in their rooms at the hospital, which also accommodates homeless people in the Paris region. The alleged rapist, who the hospital says was neither a patient nor an employee, was filmed by the facility’s surveillance cameras.
Then, two days later, the man is believed to have raped a 12-year-old girl in the Zilina-Chemin district of Nanterre. According to a source close to the case, a comparison of the suspect’s DNA “made it possible to impute him with the rape of the 12-year-old child that was committed a few days later in Nanterre.”
One day after his arrest on Friday, September 9th, at the Gare de Lyon railway station in Paris, the suspect was indicted by an investigating judge on multiple accounts of rape of a vulnerable person and for rape of a 15-year-old minor. He was subsequently remanded to police custody.
The Max-Fourestier hospital in Nanterre has told the French press that, in the wake of the rapes, it has put into place “additional security measures,” in particular “the reinforcement of controls at the entrance of the hospital” and “more frequent rounds of the security agents.”
The victim’s complaint comes days after a Jordanian migrant with three deportation orders, who had been known to circulate under 13 identities, was arrested for allegedly raping a woman in the emergency room at a Parisian hospital late last month, as The European Conservative previously reported.
