It took 14 hours for the jurors to seal the fate of Aïssa Z., a 46-year-old bus driver. It is a little more 12:15 in the night from Thursday to Friday when President Laurent Raviot announces the verdict, forcing his voice weakened by extinction: the accused is found guilty of 31 rapes and sexual assaults committed between 1995 and 2000 in the forest of Sénart (Essonne) and is sentenced to 20 years of criminal imprisonment and to a socio-judicial follow-up of 5 years. The two-thirds security sentence requested by the Advocate General is nevertheless ruled out on the grounds that Aïssa Z. does not present "a state of dangerousness requiring a security measure", justifies the president.
Among the facts against him, the two for which he was acquitted last year by the Assize Court of Essonne.
On the other hand, he is now acquitted on three other facts for which he had been convicted, including the attempted rape of a student peacekeeper from the Draveil police school who had been assaulted while jogging on April 21, 1998. not far from the establishment.
The attacker had been put to flight by his boyfriend who was passing by.
"These attacks are characterized but there is a doubt about the identity of the author", motivates the president.
"It's a disappointing decision, difficult to understand"
This does not change the penalty, the maximum incurred, as during the trial of first instance. Because the Assize Court considered that if the facts were old, their gravity requires a heavy sentence. "By not recognizing, you gave the Assize Court no possibility of understanding", further details Laurent Raviot.
"It's a disappointing decision, difficult to understand," say Gabriel Duménil and Mohamed Djema, two of the three defense lawyers, while their colleague Cloé Fonteix bursts into tears. The urological expertise has finally turned against him, we will appeal to cassation tomorrow
(this Friday)
. "This urological expertise, which took place during the trial, whereas Aïssa Z. had refused it throughout the investigation and at first instance, showed that the accused had a" penis [which] can be described as large ", according to the report of the practitioner who examined it in early October. A detail which contradicted the statements of victims on whom the DNA of Aïssa Z. had yet been found and who described an attacker with a "child sex" or a "micropenis".
Advocate General Marc Mulet, who had challenged Aïssa Z. in the first instance to do this expertise, even promising to request an acquittal if he did not correspond, judged that the stress of the act, the cold when the assaults took place in winter and late puberty could explain this difference between what the victims saw and what this expertise delivered.
Read alsoReffs in the forest of Sénart: the accused sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment
"It is an unsurprising verdict which punishes extremely serious behavior," reacts Arnaud Simonard, lawyer in civil proceedings.
Same story with François Friquet who expresses the wish "that it stop there ...".
The possibility of a cassation appeal, already announced by the defense, is a fear for the victims. Five of them attended this nocturnal verdict: "We really breathe, but we hope that it will not go until cassation now". Since the assize trial of 2020, they have remained in contact via a WhatsApp group in which they have nicknamed Aïssa Z., "zero" not to name it. "We were afraid that he would be acquitted on the 18 cases in which there is no DNA", they continue.
Aïssa Z. was accused of being the author of 34 rapes committed between 1995 and 2000 in this intra-urban forest of Essonne.
It is a new technique of analysis of the DNA in kinship which had made it possible to identify it in 2014. One of his brothers was registered with the FNAEG, the national automated file of genetic fingerprints.
The investigation into the siblings had directed the investigators of the DRPJ Versailles (Yvelines) on the youngest of this family from Corbeil-Essonnes.
A pampered child that his brothers and sisters had nicknamed "baby" or "candy".
At the time of the first rapes, he was twenty years old.
His DNA will be found on 16 seals.