A French doctor accused of raping several Vietnamese teenagers has been on trial since Monday at the Paris Assizes.
Between 2011 and 2013, Olivier Larroque, a 60-year-old French doctor, worked as a gastroenterologist at the French hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam. He is accused of raping several Vietnamese teenagers during this period. The man will have to be judged from today until Friday at the Paris assizes. The debates could take place behind closed doors.
The investigation against him began in 2013, after a complaint was sent to the French embassy in Vietnam. A local association reported the testimonies of street children aged 13 to 15 accusing this doctor of having forced them to perform sexual acts.
An SD memory card stolen by one of the teenagers was enclosed in the mail. It contained dozens of videos and photographs showing Olivier Larroque pretending to have sex with young boys.
This complaint gave rise to the opening of an investigation in France, which in turn led to the arrest of the defendant in Vietnam in July 2013. Expelled from the country, he was subsequently arrested on French soil as soon as he got off the plane .
Nine of the alleged victims, aged around 15 at the time of the events, have filed civil parties for the trial before the Paris assizes. They were recognized in the videos shot by the defendants. Other victims were identified but could not be identified.
Reclassification of facts rejected
All described a similar modus operandi: Olivier Larroque would have approached them near a lake in Hanoi where wandering children gravitate, he would have made them come to a hotel or his home and would have abused them in front of the lens. his camera. He then gave them 100,000 dong, or 4 euros at the time of the events.
During the investigation and even today, the defendant has always contested any act of coercion, stating that he did not know the age of these teenagers. He has never ceased to define himself as a client of prostitutes, in a country where the moral barriers linked to relationships with minors would, according to him, be abolished.
Olivier Larroque has asked for the reclassification of the facts of rape into recourse to the prostitution of minors. In vain. The investigating judge in fact considered that the defendant, taking advantage of his condition as a rich and Western man, had actually exercised a moral bond over these boys, who were in the throes of great poverty.
The associations for the protection of minors also joined the trial as civil parties. One of them, the Act Against Child Prostitution, deplored “the heaviness of education” which, according to her, allowed Olivier Larroque to enjoy “impunity for so many years”.
The NGO End child prostitution and trafficking believes for its part that with this case of “an exceptional nature for the defendant’s profession and the number of victims”, “it demonstrates that when there is international cooperation, it is possible to bring to justice those accused of rape abroad”.
