Two men, one a migrant with a deportation order, sexually assaulted a teenage female lifeguard on a French beach while bystanders reportedly did nothing to help.
The sex attack took place on Saturday afternoon on the Escale Borély beach in Marseille, when two men, 25 and 28, climbed the ladder of the lifeguard’s lookout chair.
The suspects were then said to have taken pictures of the young lifeguard before sexually assaulting her, touching her chest in particular. None of the beach-goers at Escale Borély, which can accommodate several thousand bathers, attempted to stop the two men, newspaper La Provence reports.
At around 5:30 pm, police were alerted to the young lifeguard crying at the bottom of her chair after a member of the coastal security and prevention unit (USPL) had spotted her during a patrol.
Police caught the two alleged sex attackers at a nearby Ferris wheel and took them into custody, but not before they became violent with officers, injuring one, and made attempts to escape arrest several times.
It later emerged that one of the men, a migrant, was also under a deportation order to leave France.
The case comes just months after a female off duty police officer was also sexually assaulted by a migrant while travelling on public transportation in the Paris no-go suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis.
The officer claimed that the man had put his hands on her and his genitals several times and then fled, despite attempts by the victim to detain him. A nearby police patrol later caught and arrested the Pakistani.
Over the last several years, France has seen a rise in sexually violent attacks, with the French Interior Ministry’s statistics service SSMI revealing in 2020 that sexual violence had increased by 12 per cent in 2019 and by 19 per cent the year before.
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