The French surgeon in the process for the abuse of nearly 300 patients

Rennes, France:

A former surgeon is to be tried on Monday in France, accused of violating or sexually assaulting nearly 300 former patients.

Joel Le Scuarnec, 74, is already in prison, after a court of 2020 found him guilty of abuse of four children, including two of his grandchildren.

In the last trial, until the last four months, he faces statements that he has assaulted or raped 299 patients, many while waking up from the anesthetic or during post-OP controls, to a dozen hospital between 1989 and 2014.

In total, 256 of the 299 victims were under 15, with the oldest and oldest 70 years.

The process is likely to be a new shock for France.

He comes just two months after the French Dominique Pelicot was convicted for registering dozens of strangers to rape his strongly seduced wife, Gisele Pelicot, who has since divorced him and became a feminist hero for refusing to refuse to -I is shameful.

In this case, Scouarnec is the only defendant accused of crimes against hundreds of victims.

The process in the city of Vannes in the western region of Brittany will take place in public, but seven days of testimony from the victims who were targeted while the minors will be kept behind the closed doors.

If he is convicted, Scouarnec faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison – the French law does not allow the addition of punishments together even when there are more victims.

“Collective failure”

The surgeon practiced for decades until retirement, despite a 2005 sentence for having sexual abusive images of children and colleagues who raise their concerns.

They Scornec practiced in the western city of Lorient in 2004, when FBI alerted the French authorities that he was among hundreds in France, who consulted images of sexual abuse with online children.

A nearby Vannes court handed over a four -month prison suspended sentence.

But until then, the doctor has already gone to work in another city in Brittany, Quimperle, where he was promoted, despite the fact that the management was aware of his conviction.

Then he moved to the south -the Vest of France, where he worked until his retirement in 2017.

Investigators discovered his alleged crimes after retiring in 2017, when a six -year -old girl accused of rape and police found accounts of abuse in his journals.

The victims and lawyers of the child’s rights say that the case highlights the systemic deficiencies that allowed them to repeatedly commit sexual crimes.

Frederic Benoist, a lawyer for the French Advocacy group at Vol by L’Efant (The Child’s Voice), said that Le Scouarnec was never prevented from practicing was the result of the “collective failure”.

Regional prosecutors have opened a separate investigation for these failures, although they do not still target any person or institution.

(Except for the title, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and is published from a union feed.)