Charges of rape against Tariq Ramadan: the request for cancellation of the indicted rejected

The investigating judges rejected the request for cancellation of indictment for rape of the Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan formulated by his lawyer, said Friday to AFP a source close to the record.

He had been indicted and jailed on 2 February for "rape" and "rape on vulnerable person", after the complaints of secular and former Salafist activist Henda Ayari and another woman, nicknamed Christelle by the media. A third woman, Mounia Rabbouj, also accuses her of rapes, and the Islamologist was placed under the status of badisted witness in this part.

In their order of three pages, of which AFP has knowledge, the The judges write that the material provided by Christelle, who claims to have been violated on 9 October 2009 in a hotel in Lyon, "proved to be accurate" after the investigations and that her repeated statements are "circumstantial and precise".

Ms. Ayari, who was confronted for the first time at Tariq Ramadan on Thursday, the magistrates point out that she had "hesitant" statements as to the date and place of the alleged rape but that "the serious or concordant indications that presided over the indictment of Tariq Ramadan subsist ". They therefore consider "premature" a cancellation of the indictment, since investigations are still ongoing.

In her initial complaint, in October 2017, this complainant claimed to have been raped in early spring 2012, in a hotel from the east of Paris. She had then evolved her story, evoking then the date of May 26, 2012 and a specific place: the Crowne Plaza hotel of the place of the Republic.

But the recent investigations brought to light that she was at this date in Rouen, at the wedding of his half-brother. Thursday, during the confrontation, she had said she could not give a precise date for the facts of which she accuses the Islamologist of 55.

afp