BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Two French rugby gamers charged with aggravated sexual assault in Argentina headed again to France on Tuesday, practically two months after their gorgeous arrest within the South American nation.
The French nationwide workforce gamers, Hugo Auradou and Oscar Jegou, wheeled their baggage by a frenzy of reports cameras within the Buenos Aires Worldwide Airport forward of their midnight Air France flight again to Paris. Addressing reporters from the departure corridor, their lawyer hailed their flight residence as a victory and described their expertise in Argentina as “a horror film that by no means ought to have existed.”
“This can be a tremendous, tremendous necessary first step, it is maybe extra necessary even than the dismissal as a result of the authorization to go away the nation implies that the authorized system of Mendoza trusted the work that we did,” legal professional Rafael Cuneo Libarona mentioned, referring to the courts within the western metropolis the place the alleged assault came about on July 7.
“I am very blissful to have defended boys with a excessive diploma of innocence towards the crude accusations that had been made towards them,” he mentioned. The athletes have denied the allegations.
An Argentine court docket in Mendoza final month ordered their launch from home arrest and, on Monday, licensed the 21-year-old athletes to return residence whilst their trial grinds on.
The harrowing testimony of a 39-year-old Argentine lady who alleged she was overwhelmed, choked and repeatedly raped by the rugby gamers of their luxurious lodge room has transfixed the skilled rugby world and shined a lightweight on what critics name a poisonous male tradition in elite sports activities.
The French Rugby Federation welcomed the court docket’s determination to let the athletes depart, saying it needed to hearken to the plaintiff however justice calls for that the athletes benefit from the presumption of innocence.
The general public prosecution in Mendoza, some 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) west of Buenos Aires, imposed a number of post-release situations. Auradou and Jegou agreed to attend hearings on the Argentine Consulate in France and return to Mendoza upon the court docket’s request.
Auradou and Jegou admit to having intercourse with the plaintiff — whom they met at a Mendoza nightclub following their workforce’s victory towards Argentina’s Pumas — however insist the encounter was consensual.
The plaintiff says that the athletes took her again to their lodge room the place they abused her and saved her towards her will. Quickly after she filed a felony grievance, the gamers had been taken into custody whereas their workforce traveled onto Uruguay to proceed its regional check tour.
A decide in Mendoza accepted the choice to permit Auradou and Jegou to return to France on Tuesday, rejecting the accuser’s request for the defendants to endure additional psychological checks.
On Aug. 12, a month after the arrest of Auradou and Jegou, the case towards them appeared to crumble because the court docket ordered them free of home arrest, highlighting a lot of obvious contradictions within the plaintiff’s testimony that undermined the prosecution’s religion in its skill to current a viable case.
The plaintiff’s attorneys have requested the dismissal of the prosecution’s investigators to no avail, accusing them of missing objectivity and failing to contemplate the case “from a gender perspective.”
The crime of aggravated sexual assault in Argentina carries a jail sentence of as much as 20 years.
