\n A French court on Friday sentenced a Saudi navy officer to 10 years in prison for the 2021 rape of a woman in France.\n <\/p>\n
Meshari Al Shamrani was tried in absentia. He had been released under judicial supervision during the investigation, but failed to check in with police in January.<\/p>\n
Al Shamrani, who was 24 at the time of the rape, attended an engineering school in the western French city of Brest.<\/p>\n
He was known as being “gifted and disciplined” at the school which he attended as part of a Saudi-French cooperation agreement, according to chief prosecutor Elsa Guyonvarch.<\/p>\n
But in his personal life, he discovered “a freedom, a moral permissiveness that was unknown to him”, the prosecutor said, adding that this “culture shock” helped to explain his behaviour without justifying it.<\/p>\n
Al Shamrani, who got married in Saudi Arabia in 2020, also had a girlfriend in Brest, where he regularly threw parties involving copious amounts of alcohol, the court heard.<\/p>\n
After one such evening, a 22-year-old woman stayed over because she had no means of getting home, and woke up to find Al Shamrani penetrating her.<\/p>\n
She fought him off, got away and alerted police.<\/p>\n
“He completely omitted to seek her consent,” said the prosecutor, who had asked for eight years of prison for the accused.<\/p>\n
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DNA and gynaecological testing backed the woman’s version of events of that night that she told the court still haunted her for years later.<\/p>\n
“I was devastated, I cried all the time and didn’t want to go out,” she said.<\/p>\n
Al Shamrani, who at first denied the accusation but then admitted what had happened, told police that he had assumed the woman “wanted to make love because she took her trousers off”.<\/p>\n
France has issued a European arrest warrant for the officer, without success so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A French court on Friday sentenced a Saudi navy officer to 10 years in prison for the 2021…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":403826,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[2000,299,36],"class_list":{"0":"post-403825","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-france"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115159959041669317","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}