sequestrated for two days in a Marseille hotel in 2017, beaten up, covered with homophobic and violated insults, Zak Ostmane had, finally, found freedom after calling for help a crew of municipal police officers passing through the street.
Le Monde with AFP
Two former legionaries were sentenced on Wednesday, May 18, in Aix-en-Provence, to eighteen and five years in prison for the rape and forcible confinement of an Algerian LGBT activist, in a room of a hotel Marseillais in 2017. The Assize Court retained the aggravating circumstance of homophobia both for violence and for rape, which alone was accused Graham Shrubb, an Irishman of 35 years.
The two former soldiers, stranded in Marseille, had invited Zak Ostmane to their hotel room on March 5, 2017, after having met him in a bar in the Old Port. Sequeted for two days, attached to a chair, beaten up, covered with homophobic and racist insults and finally violated, he had recovered freedom after having called for help a crew of municipal police officers passing through the street.
“These convictions must serve as an example for any hateful person who tries to instill homophobia who has no place in a normal society,” reacted the victim, 42, who obtained refugee status In 2014, after having fled Algeria.
The pronounced penalties are slightly lower than the requisitions of the Advocate General, Christophe Raffin, who believed that “Graham Shrubb [had] committed the most serious facts and [had] been the engine of violence”. He had requested eighteen to twenty years ‘imprisonment against the former Irish soldier and eight to ten years’ imprisonment against Alejandro Salazar, 29.
“Tell them that you are gay!”
Ultimately sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, the young Chilean was reinforced. He was released in March 2019 after two years of pre -trial detention. M es Gaëtan Poitevin and Cyril Lubrano-Lavadera stressed how their client was in the grip of Graham Shrubb, “perhaps this spirit of camaraderie of the Legion”, they suggested.
Graham Shrubb has been in detention for five years. Qualified as “leader” and “burned head”, he had been fired from the Legion for his addiction to cocaine and episodes of violence.
Evoking the “many gray areas and the multitude of doubts” surrounding the meeting of the two accused with the victim, M es anaïs têtu and Olivier Lantelme had claimed the acquittal of Graham Shrubb for rape. Because, if he recognized the violence and thefts suffered by the victim, he has always denied rape. Asked about the reasons that would push Zak Ostmane to accuse him, the ex-legionary spoke of “a big advertising operation”: “he wrote a book and he was looking to advertise,” he said Before the court, unable to explain how his sperm was able to find himself on the underpants carried by the victim.
Graham Shrubb explained his unleashing of violence by touching Zak Ostmane who would also have tried to kiss him. What the latter has always disputed. “I don’t like being touched by men, I lost control and I hit it. It was because of what I suffered in childhood,” said the Irishman, evoking Sexual abuses, of which he would have been the victim in his childhood on the part of his boxing coach.
A video of Zak Ostmane’s sequestration had been filmed by Alejandro Salazar and sent to the former partner of Graham Shrubb. Heard in videoconferencing from Ireland, this woman was still crying, five years after the facts, at the mention of this video which she had immediately erased. From a distance, she testified to having seen the victim in blood, attached to a chair, that the two men threatened: “Tell them that you are gay!”