There could be other victims. This is the reason why justice launched an appeal for witnesses, Thursday, after the arrest of a man suspected of having tried to kidnap a minor in Mont-de-Marsan, on May 2, and confused since by his DNA for a similar case dating from 2010 in Pau. The 38-year-old man was remanded in custody.
“A single modus operandi”
He is suspected of two kidnapping attempts, one on a 13-year-old girl in May in the Landes, and the other on a 21-year-old woman, thirteen years earlier, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, announced the prosecutor Olivier Janson during a press conference. It is “the same violent modus operandi thirteen years apart”, added the magistrate, describing “someone who tries to force (his victims) into a car, by gagging them with a moving tape.
According to the prosecutor, the suspect was “particularly itinerant in France” during his life: Mont-de-Marsan, Bordeaux, Pau, Besançon, Dijon then Corsica in 2018 before returning to Mont-de-Marsan in 2022. The prosecution calls on possible victims of identical facts, who would not have reported anything in the past, to approach the police services. “We know, for example, that in the summer of 2022 he traveled alone in a motorhome, across France,” said the prosecutor.
He had left traces when he fled
The individual, born in Évreux and having grown up in the Landes, had assaulted a 13-year-old schoolgirl, near a school, on May 2. His car parked on the sidewalk with the trunk open, the suspect had grabbed the teenager by the face, before gagging her to get her into his trunk. The minor had however managed to tear off the adhesive tape and alert, by her cries, a couple in a nearby street.
Fleeing at the wheel of his vehicle, the suspect had hit a lamppost and left traces allowing investigators to identify his car, a white Ford Focus. The DNA found on the adhesive tape turned out to be the same as that taken in 2010 in Pau.
The man, who “acknowledged all the facts of 2010 and 2023”, according to the prosecution, “did not explain his motivations but highlighted a certain sexual frustration”. Additional investigations will be carried out under the aegis of an investigating judge.