A Frenchman on trial for raping minors in Malaysia sentenced to 20 years in prison

Europe 1 with AFP 21:51 p.m., November 07, 2023

The Departmental Criminal Court (CCD) of Paris followed to the letter the requisitions of the prosecutor's office, which had demanded the maximum sentence provided for by law against Jean-Christophe Quenot. He was also sentenced to a twenty-year socio-judicial monitoring obligation at the end of his sentence. He will be punished with up to seven years in prison if he fails to comply with this obligation, the court warned.

"This is a very harsh sentence that can be explained by the extreme seriousness of the facts and the number of victims," the president of the court, Laurent Raviot, told the accused. "Do you understand that?" he asked. "Yes," Mr. Quenot replied. "However, this does not mean that things are definitively closed for you," the president added, "we must consolidate the work recently begun in detention" of monitoring perpetrators of sexual offences.

The convict has ten days to appeal

"I want to express my regret for the harm I caused to my victims," said Jean-Christophe Quenot, who will celebrate his 56th birthday at the end of the month, before the court retired to deliberate. A former teacher of French as a foreign language in Singapore, Mr. Quenot is suspected of having abused at least 1990 children in Southeast Asia between the early 2019s and his arrest in Bangkok in February <>.

Arrested and detained in France in March 2019 after managing to leave Thailand illegally, he was only tried in Paris for the facts that occurred in Malaysia. Before fleeing to France, he had taken care to send himself from Malaysia his notebooks and hard drives with tens of thousands of child pornography photos and videos. Investigators have uncovered 100,000 cases relating to his paedophilic "activities" in Malaysia alone.

'Unsustainable'

On Friday, on the first day of the trial, Véronique Béchu, head of the group in charge of the fight against child crime at the headquarters of the judicial police in Nanterre, stressed that the 5,000 hours of viewing of these videos had plunged investigators from her department into horror.

"We watch child abuse content every day, but it was particularly sickening," she said. Jean-Christophe Quenot systematically filmed his lovemaking and meticulously described his sexual practices in notebooks "like an archivist", "without any emotion", the CCD president noted.

During the hearing, Mr. Quenot acknowledged that he paid children, who were weak and often addicted to glue, to satisfy his fantasies. Reading excerpts from his notebooks at the hearing proved "unbearable", in the words of the president.

The culprit admits to being 'totally wrong'

Settling in Singapore and then Malaysia, he regularly travelled in search of child prostitutes in Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. During his interrogation on Monday, Mr. Quenot explained that he believed the young boys he was abusing were "indestructible."

"They knew the street, an environment where you fight. They sometimes arrived with unbelievable wounds, but always smiling. I felt like nothing was touching them. And for me, they had the choice not to join me," he said.

"The rape is unbelievably violent," a lawyer for the civil parties told him. "Yes, of course," the defendant admitted. "There are several degrees of violence and I'm not at the top of the ladder," he said. During the hearing, Mr. Quenot said he now realized he had been "totally wrong" in negotiating sexual favours for money.