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When the surprise arrest of a long-haul fugitive takes place thanks to the cooperation of the weather… In October 2021, the police evacuate a sailboat caught in a storm off the coast of Indonesia. On board, Thierry Ascione. Sentenced to life in absentia for complicity in a double assassination, he had disappeared from the radar for… twenty-one years.
October 2021: off Indonesia, a storm causes damage to a sailboat. On board the boat evacuated by the local police, a sixty-year-old Marseille man who looks like an innocent tourist. Time to verify his identity (he has no passport to present), he is transferred to the regional capital, Melonguane. Filmed by his teammate, the owner of the boat does not seem to doubt for a moment that after this formality, he will be able to board a plane bound for New Caledonia as planned…
The sexagenarian will never see New Caledonia. Turns out he’s sUnder an international arrest warrant, filed by Interpol. The red notice for murder and fraud against him details the multiple identities he has assumed. Thierry Ascione, his real name, is a convict, sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment. For more than twenty years, the French authorities have been looking for him for his involvement in a double assassination.
“They are issuing an arrest warrant, and no one is coming to arrest me!”
When “Complément d’Enquête” got in touch with him a few weeks after his arrest, Thierry Ascione is under house arrest in a hotel. Indonesia refuses to extradite him, proclaims his innocence and swears “to go out of their way to return to France”. “It’s the French government that doesn’t want me to go home! I have an arrest warrant, and is there anyone coming to get me? But who the hell are we kidding? he exclaims, furious. An exasperated man, who criticizes the incompetence of the French authorities…
These same authorities who had been looking for him for more than two decades… but how did he manage to escape them for so long? asks the journalist. To Thierry Ascione, the answer seems obvious: “In fact, you shouldn’t ask me how I did it, you should ask how the others aren’t doing their job!”
Excerpt from “Fugitives: catch me if you can!”, a document to see in “Complément d’Enquête” on February 9, 2023.
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