A Muslim holy man, known as a marabout, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for being a serial rapist who raped nine women between 2018 and 2020.
The 30-year-old man, Ali Sidibé, who is from Mali, targeted women from the West African diaspora. On top of the rape convictions, he was also found guilty of defrauding the nine women along with 15 other victims, which helped him earn tens of thousands of euros.
“The maximum sentence was necessary in this case with regard to the seriousness of the facts,” said the lawyer of five of the victims, Me Seydi Ba.
The court, which was composed of five professional judges, agreed with the prosecutor in the case, noting that the suspect is “a very dangerous individual.”
One of the judges, Alice Nicalek, said that “he doesn’t recognize anything he did wrong, and worse yet, he says he is the victim of a conspiracy and a victim of rape.”
The African convict only smiled and laughed at the announcement of his conviction, according to an AFP journalist present at the sentencing hearing.
“It’s quite astonishing for someone who is convicted of multiple rapes to have precisely this kind of dissociation to the point of laughing about it,” said the attorney for the women, Ms. Ba, who noted that none of the women were present at the sentencing.
During the trial, the women, who generally worked as housekeepers and speak West African languages such as Bambara or Pular, described how the marabout used religion to lead them to a seedy hotel in the multicultural Seine-Saint-Denis neighborhood. The women often came to the marabout with requests, such as to heal a sick child or illnesses they were facing. Sometimes the man also approached women on the street directly and told them he could heal them from the harmful “jinn” that was assailing them for no fee.
In the end, the court determined that all of these women ended up being terrorized and harassed by Ali Sidibé.
In one case, for example, a divorced mother of six sought the marabout’s services to marry a man she loved. Instead, Ali Sidibé raped her several times and ended up paying the man €400 a month, amounting to a third of her salary.
She said that if she did not obey, he threatened to curse her and her children.
Most of the victims were between 40 and 60, with many of them reportedly only reluctantly testifying due to one tenacious police officer who ensured they arrived to testify.