On the night of Thursday, April 23, several criminals broke into the home of an 85-year-old man from Seyssuel. Awakened by the noise, the octogenarian was punched in the face before being locked in one of the rooms of his home.
Demanding money, the home invaders ransacked the house, ripped out the landline telephone socket, and sprayed gasoline throughout all the rooms. Authorities say this was probably to erase any evidence of their presence, although no fire was apparently lit, according to Le Dauphine Libéré.
The victim was also doused with gasoline and then shoved into the trunk of his car. At some point, he managed to escape and alert the authorities, after which emergency services tended to him.
DL reports that the gendarmes from Chasse-sur-Rhône in charge of the investigation spent several hours investigating the site. The perpetrators reportedly fled in a stolen vehicle and are still at large.
In total, they got away with a few hundred euros.
Crimes against the elderly have been surging across France, and although in this case the identity of the perpetrators is not yet known, many of the crimes involve those of foreign ethnicity, often in France illegally. Horrifically, these have often involved the violent rape of elderly women.
Remix News has covered these cases extensively, such as here, here, and here.
Of course, France is not the only country facing this crisis, with Remix News just reporting today on an 85-year-old man beaten to within an inch of his life by a Nigerian man he had fed at a soup kitchen.
Just two weeks ago, Remix News reported on a 22-year-old man from Mali who was freed from prison over a technicality, after allegedly raping a woman in her seventies inside her home in Pistoia. An Italian court annulled his pre-trial detention on technical grounds because the original custody order had not been translated into his native language of French.
