An engineer from the company Thalès was arrested last Tuesday at his home in the 14th arrondissement of Paris and placed in police custody for acts of “invasion of the intimacy of private life by capturing images of a sexual nature”, as reported by our colleagues of Europe 1.
The man is suspected of having installed mini-cameras in the women’s toilets of the Eataly restaurant, on the BHV site on rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie (4th). He would thus have filmed almost 200 women and children without their knowledge by placing these devices in fake smoke detectors which would have been discovered by a woman on February 8.
A similar device in another restaurant in 2020
Technical investigations carried out on the Internet network used for the recordings enabled the authorities to trace the suspect. A search, confirmed at 20 minutes by the company, took place in the premises of Thalès rue Charles Lindbergh in Rungis.
The investigations allowed the police to discover that a similar device had been installed in August 2020 in the toilets of a McDonald’s in Montparnasse.
The management of Thalès assures that these facts “are the result of an individual behavior of the employee, without any link with the company”, and that it brings “its full cooperation to the investigation in progress and is studying the advisability of filing a complaint “.
Contacted by us, the Lafayette Group, owner of the BHV and the restaurant, does not wish to comment on the facts for the moment.