Paris police officers to be DNA tested in gang-rape case

Some 100 officers and staff at Paris’s police headquarters on the Seine are to be DNA tested later this week in an unprecedented move by judges investigating the alleged rape of a Canadian tourist in a well known building on Quai des Orfèvres last year, international media report. The tests are a bid to match the DNA of a third man that was found on the woman’s clothes.

Two police officers from Paris’s elite anti-gang-crime squad were charged last year after a 34-year-old Canadian woman filed a complaint that she had been raped by a group of officers, with both officers denying rape, but one admitting to having had consensual sex.

According to the Guardian, the accused are also facing an investigation into tampering with the scene of the crime while another police officer was made an “assisted witness”, meaning he will be called to testify but is not under suspicion.

The woman claims that she had met the off-duty police officers at an Irish pub where they had been out drinking one evening in April 2014 and she made a complaint later the same night that they had raped her at their headquarters across the river from the pub.

The case, in which French police were accused of a gang-rape inside their own building, shocked the country, with interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, saying the two officers would “face the full consequences” if they were found guilty.

The police headquarters, known for its address, 36 Quai des Orfèvres, close to Notre Dame cathedral, was for years the base of Paris’s detective branch, and it was the inspiration behind numerous crime novels and films. It was made famous by the Maigret novels written by Georges Simenon between 1930 and 1972. The headquarters has also been at the centre of several scandals in recent years with a police sergeant from the anti-drugs unit being placed under investigation on suspicion of stealing €2 million worth of cocaine that had been seized in a raid, last year