A 27-year-old Pakistani migrant was arrested in the Paris no-go suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis after sexually assaulting an off-duty female police officer on an RER express train.
The incident took place at around 6:30 pm on Tuesday when the man boarded a train at the Gare Du Nord railway station and sat next to the female police officer who works in the 13th district of Paris.
According to the officer, the man put his hands on the woman and his genitals several times. Despite the victim’s efforts to detain the man, who was described to be an immigrant from Pakistan, he fled the scene, newspaper Le Parisien reports.
A nearby police patrol nearby arrested the migrant, taking him into custody. A source close to the investigation stated that the migrant admitted that he had touched the off-duty officer.
According to the source, investigators searched his home but found nothing suspicious. Police released the man the following day.
Sexual assaults and sex attacks remain a major problem on Paris’s public transport system, with a 2019 report revealing that the city’s travel networks had seen over 1,000 reports of sexual assaults the year before.
A year earlier, a plain-clothes police officer who works on the public transport system admitted that the vast majority of sex attackers on the metro system were migrants, mainly from North African countries.
“For more than ten years that I have done this job, the suspects I have arrested are a very, very large majority from a North African origin,” he said and added: “As for the victims, they could be teenagers or retirees. And men too, more and more.”