The 61-year-old man was found guilty of 54 rape and sexual assault cases out of the 56 for which he was tried. The facts took place between 1988 and 2018.
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The apologies presented to the victims in the morning did not mollify the court. Judged for three weeks at the Assizes of the North, Dino Scala, nicknamed the “rapist of the Sambre”, was sentenced Friday, July 1 to 20 years of criminal imprisonment, accompanied by a two-thirds security period. He was found guilty of 54 rape and sexual assault cases out of the 56 for which he was tried.
The court followed the sentence required by the prosecution against this 61-year-old man, tried for 17 rapes, 12 attempted rapes and 27 assaults or attempted sexual assaults. The public prosecutor had requested his conviction for all the facts, committed between 1988 and 2018, near the home of Dino Scala, around the Sambre, a river crossing the Franco-Belgian border.
Of the 56 victims, aged 13 to 48 at the time of the events, nearly half did not attend the trial. If three of them died, many preferred not to confront their attacker. Dino Scala’s lawyer, Margaux Mathieu, lambasted Thursday a “botched investigation” and connections made with “a coarse-mesh sieve”between real facts and files “which are empty”.