Fragile men reduced to slavery, forced to beg and return all the gains to their torturers. Poor mothers undergoing degrading treatment on a daily basis. Desocialized victims, under curatorship, put under the thumb of a criminal group and forced to live in unworthy conditions, sometimes in a car or held almost captive in a camp for members of the Traveler community.
Eleven members of this criminal network located in Saumur (Maine-et-Loire) have just been charged after being arrested, on February 4 and 5, by the gendarmes of the Angers research section (SR). Six of them were imprisoned.
When they start to take an interest in these thugs based in Saumur, the gendarmes do not yet work on human trafficking. For the past few weeks, they have been investigating thefts from elderly people, approached by direct sellers or calendar vendors. The sellers mainly took advantage of this pretext to enter these easy prey in order to steal jewelry or cash. A few weeks after the first facts, the gendarmes began to take an interest in a group controlled several times in the process of selling calendars or various trinkets. Members of the settled Traveler community in Saumur.
A dozen people "recruited"
Convinced that the calendar sale is just a way to approach the elderly, the investigators set up surveillance on the group. And discover a much wider radius of action than imagined. "They are suspected of sixty facts, says a close to the investigation. They could travel hundreds of kilometers to strike in the Marne and even in the Toulouse region. "
It is by multiplying the surveillance that the investigators discovered, in the entourage of the group, this dozen people recruited from outside the community and forced to beg.
On February 4, more than 200 gendarmes were mobilized to arrest 13 suspects in Vendée, Somme and Vienne, as well as in Maine-et-Loire. The investigators seized, as criminal assets, property and buildings whose total value is estimated at around 700,000 euros.