Thirty years of rape and sexual assault, often in the twilight of the early morning, by an elusive man, and 56 victims marked for life: the Northern Assize Court condemned this Friday of Dino Scala, nicknamed the "rapist of la Sambre", to 20 years' imprisonment, the maximum sentence.
The prosecution requested Thursday the maximum sentence, 20 years of criminal imprisonment, accompanied by two thirds of security, against this 61-year-old man, tried for 17 rapes, 12 attempted rapes and 27 assaults or attempted assaults sexual.
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The facts were committed between 1988 and 2018, near the home of Dino Scala, around the Sambre, a river crossing the Franco-Belgian border.
Behind the image of the well-integrated worker, married, father, coach of a local football club, one of the two general attorneys, Antoine Berthelot pointed to the "extreme dangerousness" of the accused, discerning in his career "the unthinkable banality of evil".
The three weeks of trial did not completely remove the mystery around his personality, characterized according to a psychiatric expert by the “abyss that separates the social face and the hidden face”.
“I have caused too much misfortune around me”
Expressing himself well and very talkative to evoke his own sufferings and frustrations, Dino Scala, who recognizes 40 of the 56 facts which are reproached to him, provided only snippets of explanations on the triggering and the reiteration of his passages to the 'deed.
The same modus operandi is found in most of them: assaults almost always at dawn, in winter, generally on the public highway, victims attacked from behind, strangled with the forearm or a cord, dragged away, often threatened with a knife.
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Expert psychiatrists and psychologists have seen in these attacks a rage to dominate, a pleasure taken from the terror of the victims, on the part of a man who is not very focused on sex but steeped in frustration, who expresses the recurring complaint of not having been recognized at its fair value in his married, professional and sporting life.
The victims had for him neither age nor face, conclude the experts: they were abstract shadows.
Asked about the risk that he would start again if he got out of prison, the sexagenarian, who said he was ready for chemical castration, assured that it was “impossible”: “I caused too much misfortune around me.
When I attacked these people, I did not realize the seriousness of the facts.
For me, there was no violence.
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