Fifteen members of the Nigerian criminal gang Arrow Baga were sentenced Friday in Marseille to sentences ranging from two to ten years in prison for their ultraviolent methods, including two gang rapes of prostitutes.
Since November 6, the Marseille criminal court has been trying these fifteen men, aged between 22 and 40, for sexual assault, pimping and acts ranging from violence and extortion to aiding the entry and illegal stay of foreigners.
Permanent ban on French territory
All were found guilty of criminal conspiracy for their membership in the Arrow Baga, one of the Nigerian mafia gangs that established a few years ago in the Marseille city. A definitive ban from French territory was pronounced against all those convicted.
Six of them were sentenced to ten years in prison, the maximum penalty, for having taken part in gang rapes, penalized as sexual assaults committed in a group and with the use of weapons.
An abandoned house in the northern districts as a headquarters
The court was seized of two gang rapes, one committed on March 30, 2020 by around twenty men on four Nigerian prostitutes in an apartment of a very degraded private condominium transformed into a squat.
The other dates back to July 2019 and took place in an abandoned house in the northern districts of Marseille used by the Arrow Baga as their headquarters. A young woman was raped there by several men to force her into prostitution.
Rape as punishment
In her indictment, prosecutor Marion Luna denounced, Monday, the violence of these attacks. “Nigerian “cults” – former student fraternities that have become criminal organizations – “use rape as a punishment, a weapon of domination. Their method is to break prostitutes with rape and beat them to keep them in their service.”
The nine other defendants were sentenced to sentences ranging from two to eight years in prison, the heaviest punishing acts of pimping by coercion or a particularly high role in the hierarchy of this gang identifiable by its red outfits.