By Euronews with AFP
Published on •Updated
French prosecutors on Tuesday appealed for more testimony from potential further victims in a mass abuse case against a 79-year-old former teacher charged with the rape and sexual assault of 89 minors since the 1960s across multiple countries.
Prosecutor Etienne Manteaux spoke to reporters in the southeastern city of Grenoble to publicise the case of the man, who had also confessed to killing his terminally ill mother and his elderly aunt.
In an unusual move, French authorities named the suspect, Jacques Leveugle, who was born in 1946 in Annecy, an Alpine town an hour’s drive away from Grenoble.
Leveugle has been in custody since being charged in 2024, the prosecutor said.
“This name must be known because the aim is to enable potential victims to come forward,” the prosecutor said.
Manteaux said that Leveugle, who is accused of abusing minors in countries including Germany, India and Colombia between 1967 and 2022, has called himself a “gentleman boy-lover” and targeted male teenagers aged 13 to 17.
“Cultured and charismatic”, Leveugle took the youngsters under his wing and proceeded to “intellectually seduce” them, he said.
He saw himself “as an ancient Greek training young ephebes,” added Manteaux, using a term for a male adolescent in ancient Greece.
Investigators were first alerted in 2022 when the suspect’s nephew, who had “suspicions” about his uncle’s actions, handed them USB keys belonging to Leveugle.
They “contain 15 tomes of very dense material,” said Manteaux, adding the investigators had reviewed the writings.
Race against time
“There was never any violence,” added Serge Procedes, commander of the Grenoble investigation unit. “We are really talking about moral coercion.”
The investigation is a race against time, added Procedes, given the suspect’s age and the statute of limitations.
“This judicial investigation will have to be closed in 2026,” he said.
The witness appeal is aimed at “seeking out” unidentified victims or those who appear in the documents “only by their nickname or first name”, said Procedes.
Around 150 people have been interviewed to date but only two have decided to bring a civil action, prosecutors said.
Investigators have identified 89 victims to date.
“There is a real ambivalence among the victims, which is somewhat unique to this case,” said Procedes, adding the suspect had “invested himself intellectually to better satisfy his sexual urges”.
When asked why prosecutors did not reveal the information when Leveugle was placed under investigation, Manteaux said that it was a “somewhat unusual case, and we wanted to first ensure the veracity of the facts”.
Leveugle had no previous criminal record.
‘Different countries’
A French court in May last year sentenced retired doctor Joel Le Scouarnec to 20 years in prison after he confessed to sexually abusing or raping 298 patients between 1989 and 2014.
Of those, more than 250 victims were under 15.
Victims and child rights advocates say that case highlighted systemic flaws that allowed Le Scouarnec to repeatedly commit sexual crimes.
Leveugle allegedly committed the crimes against minors in Germany, Switzerland, Morocco, Niger, Algeria, the Philippines, India, Colombia, and the French overseas territory of New Caledonia, where he worked as a freelance teacher and instructor, said Manteaux.
His roles included instructor of speleology, or the study of caves, and French teacher.
“He travelled to these different countries and in each of these places where he settled to provide tutoring and teach, he would meet young people and have sexual relations with them,” said Manteaux.
The man also confessed to suffocating his mother — a terminally ill cancer patient — with a pillow in the 1970s to “end her suffering”, he added.
He also suffocated his 92-year-old aunt, also with a pillow, in the 1990s, the prosecutor said.
The suspect “justifies his actions by saying that he would like someone to do the same for him if he found himself in this end-of-life situation”, the prosecutor said.