Swiss Islamologist Tariq Ramadan said in a televised interview on Friday that he did not know the woman who accused her of raping her at a meeting in Lyon in 2014 and that he was on that date in the United States .
The 57-year-old Muslim intellectual, already indicted in France for two rapes he is challenging and under investigation for the charges of a third woman, is targeted this summer by a fourth complaint, this time for "meeting rape". In this complaint, filed on July 12, a woman claims to have been raped on May 23, 2014 by the Islamologist and one of her friends at the Sofitel in Lyon, where she was to interview him.
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"On May 23, 2014 I am giving a conference in Baltimore in front of 10,000 people," Tariq Ramadan told RMC / BFMTV on Friday during his first media coverage since his release from prison on November 16, 2018, after nine months and a half of detention.
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- Tariq Ramadan (@TariqRamadan) September 6, 2019"Except for having the gift of ubiquity (...), I was not there ... I have never stayed at the Sofitel Lyon, ever," he added. The entourage of the Islamologist then said that May 23, he left Europe from London at 16:35 and arrived at 19:55 in Baltimore, the conference was actually held the next day.
At the beginning of the case, at the end of 2017, Tariq Ramadan had also raised an alibi to challenge the accusations of Christelle, media nickname of one of the first two complainants who denounced a rape committed on October 9, 2009.
The Islamologist had provided a plane reservation to try to show he had arrived in Lyon a few hours after the fact, but the investigation established that he had changed his ticket to arrive earlier. He now pleads a "consented relationship".
"I never contacted this lady," defends Tariq Ramadan
The new complainant, in her fifties, also reports that she was contacted by Tariq Ramadan on the Messenger application on January 28, 2019, two months after her release from prison. She would not have answered and would have received the next day the disturbing visit of two men on this subject.
"I have never contacted this lady, I do not know who she is," defended Tariq Ramadan Friday. "This last complaint, it comes to make a smokescreen on everything we know today," he continued, before listing the elements of the investigation that contradict, according to him, the testimony of his accusers.