The Lebanese ambassador to France is under investigation for rape and intentional violence after complaints from two former employees of the embassy, we learned on Friday from sources close to the investigation, pushing the Quai to Orsay to ask Beirut to waive the immunity of its diplomat.
“Faced with the gravity of the facts mentioned, we consider it necessary for the Lebanese authorities to lift the immunity of the Lebanese ambassador in Paris in order to facilitate the work of French justice,” the ministry reacted to AFP on Friday evening. French for Foreign Affairs.
Rape and “daily humiliations”
The first woman, 31, filed a complaint in June 2022 for a rape committed, according to her account to the police, in May 2020 in the private apartment of Ambassador Rami Adwan, in office since 2017, according to sources close to the investigation, which confirmed the revelations of the online media Mediapart. In her complaint consulted by AFP, she declares having signified her refusal of a sexual relationship, having shouted and cried.
The young woman, employed as an editor, had already reported to the police in 2020 that Adwan had hit her during an argument in her office, but without filing a complaint so as not to “break the life of this man”, married and father of family. She had a “romantic relationship” with the ambassador who exercised “psychological and physical violence on her with daily humiliation”.
Violence after refusals
The second woman, aged 28, who had also established an intimate relationship with the diplomat shortly after his arrival as an intern in 2018, filed a complaint last February to denounce a series of physical attacks often committed after a refusal by a sexual intercourse.
She claims in particular that Rami Adwan tried to hit her with his car during an argument on the sidelines of the Forum for Peace in Caen, western France, in September. She also accuses the ambassador of having tried to asphyxiate her at home by burying her face on her bed at the end of December.
“My client disputes any accusation of assault in any form whatsoever: verbal, moral, sexual. He had with these two women between 2018 and 2022 romantic relationships interspersed with disputes and breakups, ”reacted to AFP Rami Adwan’s lawyer, Me Karim Beylouni.