 March 31, 2006
Youth on trial for burning girl alivePARIS -- A 22 year-old French man went on trial in the Paris suburb of Creteil on Friday accused of burning a teenage girl to death in a crime that became an emblem of the sufferings of young women in poor French neighborhoods.
Prosecutors say that in October 2002 Jamal Derrar doused 17 year-old Sohane Benziane with gasoline at the foot of a tower-block in Vitry-sur-Seine, southeast of Paris, and set her on fire. She died two hours later in hospital.
Derrar, who says that he only meant to scare the girl, acted to avenge himself after he was humiliated in a fight with her boyfriend, investigators believe.
He is accused of "acts of torture and barbarity that unintentionally led to death" and faces a possible life term in jail.
Tony Rocca, 23, is accused of abetting Derrar by guarding the door of the bin-room where the crime took place, and also risks life in jail.
Sohane's death provoked national outrage, and a campaigning group - Neither Whores nor Slaves - was set up to draw attention to the mistreatment of women in France's high-immigration city suburbs.
"There are loads of girls in the estates who get hit or humiliated, and no one gives a damn. When a girl gets smacked in the face, no one bats an eye. It's just normal," said Sohane's sister Kahina in an interview with Le Point magazine this week.
"In every estate there is some girl who has been beaten or raped but who refuses to go to the police. It was only when my sister was burned alive that people began talking," she said.
The trial is due to last a week.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
April 10, 2006
Man gets 25-years' jail for burning girl alive in FranceAFP
CRETEIL, France -- A young man who doused a 17-year-old girl in lighter fuel and burned her to death received a 25-year jail sentence from a French court on Saturday.
Jamal Derrar, 22, was found guilty of torture leading to the unintended death of Sohane Benziane, a Frenchwoman of Algerian origin whom he set on fire and left to die in the basement of a run-down housing estate in Vitry-sur-Seine near Paris, in October 2002.
His friend and co-defendant Tony Rocca, 23, received an eight-year jail term for being an accessory. He denied holding shut the door to the area where Derrar sprayed Sohane with lighter fluid.
The family's lawyer Francis Szpiner said the family was satisfied with the verdict, but leaving the court the victim's father said: "They would have done better to kill him on the spot."
"The court considered that it was a case of extremely grave acts. We cannot therefore talk of an accident nor the trivialisation of these acts," Szpiner said.
Derrar's lawyer did not rule out an appeal.
State prosecutor Jean-Paul Content argued at the end of the six-day case that Derrar had premeditated what he called "an act of boundless cruelty", but had intended only to scare the young woman, not to kill her.
According to the prosecutor, Derrar had focused his anger on Sohane after getting into a fight with her boyfriend. Witnesses said he had tried to ban her from the estate and ambushed her to teach her a lesson after she defied him, the prosecutor said.
Sohane's murder deeply shocked the country and her name became synonymous with the fight to improve women's rights, particularly to combat violence against women of immigrant background in the country's poor suburbs.
|
