What was really going on behind the doors of this apartment?
Suspected of having kidnapped and kidnapped two teenage girls, three individuals were arrested in a building in the 19th arrondissement of Paris this Saturday.
They were taken into custody in police custody late this afternoon.
The investigation is entrusted to the minor protection brigade (BPM) of the Paris judicial police.
The case began this Friday when the father of one of the victims received a phone call from his daughter.
Placed in a home, from which she ran away in mid-January, she explains to him that she was kidnapped and that she is being held against her will.
Warned, BPM investigators managed to geolocate the victim's phone in a building located on Avenue de Flandres.
In this tall tower, they suspect that the teenage girl is being forced into prostitution.
He greets the police with a knife
Around 4 p.m. this Saturday, investigators, supported by police officers from the 19th century police station, took action.
When they arrived at the accommodation in question, they were greeted by one of the occupants, in a drunken state, who brandished a knife in front of their eyes.
But the latter is quickly neutralized using an electric pulse gun.
Inside the apartment, the police arrested two other people, also drunk.
There, they found the victim who had called his father.
Or rather the victims.
They indeed discover that another young girl, also a minor, is also present in the apartment.
Was she also sequestered?
For the moment, the Paris prosecutor's office has not given details.
But the two victims had to be heard by the police in order to give their story.
In France, 15,000 minors are victims of prostitution.
In 2021, a group specializing in investigations into the pimping of minors was also created within the BPM to fight against this growing phenomenon in Paris and its inner suburbs.
Questioned in our columns in September 2023, the boss of the BPM, Christophe Molmy, estimated that these cases had “multiplied tenfold in ten years”.