For the four victims, homosexual men, the same modus operandi. First, making contact, flirting on the dating app Grindr. Then the meeting at home which turns into violent theft and extortion. Four young people aged 19 to 21, tried Thursday by the Nice criminal court, were sentenced to prison terms, up to four years for two of them, already in detention, it was reported learned from concordant sources, confirming information of Nice morning. The other two received eighteen and fifteen months. They were all arrested in the summer of 2022 after a series of four attacks alongside a fifth individual, a minor.
At the hearing, a forty-year-old recounted how he found himself tied up, injured and threatened with death with a knife in his own home. Persuaded to open his door to a man with whom he had communicated on his smartphone, he finally found himself face to face with three individuals, forced to provide them with the confidential codes of his bank cards and his jewelry, among other things, details the regional daily.
“Meeting” and not sexual orientation as an aggravating circumstance
This 45-year-old man was the only one of the four people named in the case to attend the hearing on Thursday. “80% of victims of this type of ambush do not file a complaint,” said Me Xavier Fruton, the lawyer for the LGBTQIA + Côte d’Azur center, whose civil party status was not granted by the court.
The aggravating circumstance of the sexual orientation of the victims was not taken into account for the benefit of the “combination” of these violent thefts. “We deplore, once again, that justice does not take into account the aggravating nature of homophobia, blatant in our opinion in this case,” reacted Erwan Le Hô, the coordinator of the structure, quoted by Nice morning. It was indeed homosexual men who were targeted as such. »