France charges 25 suspects in crypto abduction cases

PARIS: Twenty-five people, including six minors, were charged in Paris over a spate of kidnappings and attempted abductions of top figures in France’s cryptocurrency world, prosecutors said on Saturday.

“Eighteen people have been placed in pre-trial detention, three have requested a deferred hearing, and four have been placed under judicial supervision,” the Paris public prosecutor’s office said, adding that the suspects were aged between 16 and 23.

The investigation into “attempted kidnapping by an organised gang” centres on a May 13 kidnapping attempt targeting the daughter and grandson of the chief executive officer of crypto firm Paymium, carried out in broad daylight in eastern Paris.

Prosecutors said the probe also covers “other unsuccessful plans”, including an initial failed attempt on the same targets the day before, and a disrupted operation near the western city of Nantes on Monday.

Authorities said this week they had thwarted the Nantes abduction and detained more than 20 suspects in connection with that plot and the one targeting Paymium boss Pierre Noizat’s family.

Footage of that attempted abduction shared on social media showed four masked men attacking Noizat’s daughter, her husband and their child in the French capital’s 11th district in mid-May.

All three suffered light injuries and were taken to hospital.

Noizat later praised his “heroic” son-in-law and a man who used a red fire extinguisher to fend off the attackers.

According to a source close to the case, it was while investigating that abduction attempt that the police discovered the new plot near Nantes.

Most of the suspects were born in France and others in Senegal, Angola and Russia.Among those arrested so far are suspects accused of involvement in carrying out the abductions and more senior figures believed to be involved in logistics, according to sources close to the case.

Ambroise Vienet-Legue, who represents an 18-year-old suspect in the Nantes plot, described the accused as “very young”, lured by money and out of their depth. “My client admitted to being a fuse in a criminal machine” and deeply regrets it, he said.