The Paris prosecutor’s office is seeking to indict nine migrants for the murder of 36-year-old transgender prostitute Vanesa Campos who was killed in August 2018.
Campos, originally from Peru, was found dying by other prostitutes in the Bois de Boulogne park in Paris’s 16th district on the night of August 16th.
Prosecutors are looking to charge nine migrant men, mostly from Egypt, who were aged between 15 and 30 at the time of the prostitute’s death. Of the suspects, three are believed to be directly involved with Campos’s killing, Le Monde reports.
The suspects are part of a gang led by a man named “El Nano”, or “the dwarf”. The group, which was known for creating tensions with the prostitutes, would raid the sex workers and their clients and steal from them.
To combat the attacks, the prostitutes hired their own security. But on the night of the killing, the migrants were armed with weapons, tear gas, tasers, and even a police-issued firearm that had been stolen from an officer’s car while he was engaged with a prostitute.
Just months after the killing, police arrested nine illegal migrants in connection with the murder.
The man suspected of having used the gun to kill Campos, Mahmoud K., had fled the country. He was not arrested until January 2019 in neighbouring Germany, where he was found in a migrant home.
Just months after the murder, three migrants, also said to be from Egypt, were arrested for robbing transgender prostitutes at the same park in Paris and beating them with sticks.
In October 2019, a gang of Moroccan migrants were put on trial in Rennes for sexually assaulting and robbing prostitutes in several French cities.