Gendarmerie illustration.

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SYSPEO / SIPA

  • A Frenchman was arrested and imprisoned in Madagascar.

  • He is suspected of the assassination of a business manager from Var, whose body was found a month after his disappearance in June 2019.

He was found dead in the forest a month after his kidnapping.

A Frenchman suspected of the assassination in June 2019 of the boss of a pleasure craft company in Cavalaire-sur-Mer (Var), was arrested and imprisoned in Madagascar, the Draguignan prosecutor's office announced on Tuesday.

Jean-Marc Sandré, whose alleged assassin should be extradited "in the coming weeks" according to the prosecution, was managing Marine Plaisance, a company member of a group of shipyards on the Var coast, when on the morning of June 3, 2019, he had disappeared without giving any more sign of life to his family.

Ransom letter

The latter had received "a ransom letter for him to be released", detailed in a statement the public prosecutor Patrice Camberou, a precision kept secret until now to preserve the investigation.

"The investigators, thanks to a very strong mobilization of resources, over time, to resolve this case, in all discretion so as not to wake up the suspect, were moving at the end of 2019 on the trail of a a French national who grew up and lived in Cavalaire and has known Jean-Marc Sandré for a long time ”, continued the magistrate.

At the end of "a huge amount of investigations, dozens of hearings and checks to exploit all the leads" and provided with an international arrest warrant, French gendarmes assisted by the Malagasy police arrested the suspect on Thursday last in Diego Suarez, in the tourist and seaside north of Madagascar, where he had already lived in the past and had left to relocate a few days after the fact.

Body hidden in the forest

Brought back under escort to the Malagasy capital Antananarivo and presented to a Madagascan judge, he was indicted for murder, extortion at the threat of a weapon, kidnapping and kidnapping, said Mr. Camberou, welcoming the judicial cooperation between France. and Madagascar, where he himself worked as an advisor to the Madagascan Ministry of Justice.

Deputy mayor of Cavalaire-sur-Mer from 1995 to 2008, Mr. Sandré had also headed the tourist office.

His body was found on July 2, hidden in an inaccessible area of ​​forest near Cavalaire-sur-Mer, not far from the place where his vehicle was found abandoned on a forest track the day after his disappearance.

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  • Removal

  • Madagascar

  • Ransom

  • Investigation

  • Miscellaneous

  • Assassination