France expands rape probe against Islamic scholar

PARIS: The French authorities have expanded an investigation against Tariq Ramadan, a leading Islamic scholar already charged in France with raping two women, to include evidence from two more alleged victims, judicial sources said Sunday. Ramadan, a Swiss national, 57, has already been charged in France with raping a disabled woman in 2009 and a feminist activist in 2012. He denies all the charges. Paris prosecutors earlier this month instructed the investigating magistrate handling the case to look into the evidence from “two new potential victims” over incidents that took place in 2015 and 2016, a judicial source told AFP, confirming a report in Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper. Investigators took witness statements from the two women after they were identified from documents found on his computers. The women themselves have not filed a criminal complaint. But they both say they were led into a brutal sexual relationship with Ramadan, one from November-December 2015 and the other in March 2016. “It was something other than physical rape, it went beyond that... there was a moral rape,” one of the women said in her testimony seen by AFP.