Islamic scholar Ramadan facing rape charges
Tariq Ramadan, an Islamic scholar and University of Oxford professor, has been preliminarily charged in two alleged cases of rape, a judicial source said on Friday.
Mr Ramadan, 55, was arrested and questioned by police in Paris last week in connection with claims by two women, who said he assaulted them in hotel rooms in France in 2009 and 2012. Both filed their complaints last year.
He has now been charged with charges of rape and rape of a vulnerable person, the source said. He was remanded on Friday.
Mr Ramadan, who is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, denied the accusations against him. He has filed a slander complaint against the writer Henda Ayari, one of his accusers.
Last November, the senior research fellow at St Antony’s College at the university, took a leave of absence after the complaints were filed.
A magistrate followed the request of the Paris prosecutor’s office in charging him.
Preliminary charges mean that after a full investigation the suspect can either be freed for lack of grounds or be indicted and sent to trial. The investigation can be lengthy.
The prosecutor’s office has asked the judge to keep Mr Ramadan, who holds Swiss nationality, in custody.
Women who have testified anonymously during three months of preliminary investigations might now also file rape complaints, sources said.
In the early hours of Friday, Mr Ramadan was taken to the prosecutor’s office. It came after a meeting in which one of his alleged victims, a disabled woman named only as Christelle, provided information about a part of his anatomy, The Times reported. Mr Ramadan has denied having contact with her.
He refused to sign the police transcript of his confrontation with Christelle, in which he says he had met her in a hotel lobby in 2009 for 30 minutes.
Christelle has told police that Mr Ramadan has a scar on his groin. Mr Ramadan has confirmed this, according to The
Times newspaper. Speaking on French television last year, Christelle told how she feared for her life when, she claimed, Mr Ramadan hit her crutch to make her fall, picked her up by her hair and proceed to sexually assault her over a period of hours.
“It was hell – blows, sexual violence, unspeakable, disgusting language. The more I screamed, the more he hit me,” she said.
She filed a formal complaint against him in October, in which she described her battle with depression and her attempt to commit suicide after the attack. The other complainant, Ms Ayari, claimed Mr Ramadan raped her in a Paris hotel room in 2012.
Ms Ayari, 41, who lodged a rape complaint against him on October 20, claimed that for Mr Ramadan, “either you wear a veil or you get raped”.
“He choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die,” she said.
She said she was encouraged to speak out against him publicly by the Me Too campaign. A third woman told Le Parisien in October that Mr Ramadan sexually harassed her in 2014. The woman, identified as Yasmina, said Mr Ramadan blackmailed her for sexual favours, threatening to distribute “compromising pictures” of her.
All the complainants said they had made contact with Mr Ramadan for spiritual guidance.
In further allegations, Mr Ramadan was accused of seducing four of his teenage pupils in the 1980s and 1990s when he was teaching in his hometown of Geneva.
Four of his former students described the incidents to The
Tribune de Geneve newspaper, which published their stories in November.
Mr Ramadan has called the accusations against him “a campaign of lies launched by my adversaries”.