Twenty years of criminal imprisonment, with two-thirds security: Dino Scala, the “rapist of the Sambre”, was sentenced Friday by the Assizes of the North to the maximum penalty for serial rape and sexual assault committed for 30 years. The accused, 61, is found guilty of 54 of the 56 acts for which he was tried: 17 rapes, 12 attempted rapes and 27 assaults or attempted sexual assaults, committed between 1988 and 2018 near his home, around the Sambre, a river crossing the Franco-Belgian border. He had only recognized 40 of them.
The Charleroi public prosecutor’s office has identified eight former cases of sexual offenses or crimes in Erquelinnes over the period 2004-2018 in which the alleged serial rapist could be implicated, including the final assault which led to his arrest. These files of rape or indecent assault had been closed by classifications without follow-up or dismissals but were reopened, in particular to see if they contain usable DNA expertise, with traces likely to be compared. to the suspect’s DNA. In 2019, the King’s prosecutor of Charleroi was officially removed from the case to make way for the French authorities.
This sentence is in line with that required Thursday by the prosecution, which had however requested his conviction for all the facts concerned.
“I will apologize to the victims, Mr. President,” he said in a voice showing little emotion, early in the morning, his last words before the court retired to deliberate.
Behind the image of the well-integrated worker, married, father of a family, coach of a football club, one of the two general attorneys, Antoine Berthelot, pointed to the “extreme dangerousness” of the accused, discerning in his journey “the unthinkable banality of evil”.
The three weeks of trial have not completely lifted the mystery around his personality, characterized according to a psychiatric expert by the “abyss that separates the social face and the hidden face”.
Expressing himself well and very eloquent to evoke his own frustrations, Dino Scala, who recognizes 40 of the 56 facts which are reproached to him, provided only snippets of explanations on his passages to the act.
The same modus operandi is found in most of them: assaults almost always at dawn, in winter, generally on the public highway, victims attacked from behind, strangled with the forearm or a cord, dragged away, often threatened with a knife.
Expert psychiatrists and psychologists have seen in these attacks a rage to dominate, a pleasure taken from the terror of the victims, on the part of a man who is not very focused on sex but steeped in frustration, who expresses the recurring complaint of not having been recognized at its fair value in his married, professional and sporting life.
The victims had for him neither age nor face, conclude the experts: they were abstract shadows.
Asked about the risk that he would start again if he got out of prison, the sixty-year-old, who says he is ready for chemical castration, assured that it was “impossible”: “I caused too much misfortune around me. When I attacked these people, I did not realize the gravity of the facts.”
Of the 56 victims, aged 13 to 48 at the time of the events, nearly half did not attend the trial. If three of them died, many preferred not to confront their attacker.
Those who succeeded each other at the helm appeared deeply marked. “It’s been 22 years since I relive this rape, it’s torture,” testified one of them.
Some had also been mistreated when they filed a complaint, or even called liars.
For Fanny Bruyerre, lawyer for nine victims, “the law is not up to par: 20 years is so little” for 56 “lives destroyed”. “The maximum penalty incurred is shorter than the duration of his actions,” she noted before the verdict.
Long fruitless, the investigation ended up being successful after an assault in 2018 in Belgium, where a CCTV camera captured the image of Dino Scala’s car.