Jacqueline Veyrac, hotel heiress, was held hostage for 48 hours in 2016 outside Nice
Credit: VALERY HACHE/AFP
A French court heard on Friday how DNA under fingernails linked a British ex-soldier to the kidnapping of a Riviera hotel heiress as she testified at the trial of 13 defendants.
Along with Briton Philip Dutton, 52, the colourful cast of characters in the dock included a paparazzo-turned private detective nicknamed Tintin and the disgruntled ex-manager of a Michelin-starred Nice restaurant who went bankrupt.
The main suspect is Giuseppe Serena, the Italian former manager of La Reserve, a select seafront eatery owned by Jacqueline Veyrac, 80, who also owns the five-star Grand Hotel in Cannes.
Mrs Veyrac terminated his contract in 2009 for alleged mismanagement.
Mr Serena, 76, is accused of ordering her 2016 abduction in a desperate last-minute bid to obtain funds with which he hoped to open a new, rival restaurant.
Mrs Veyrac was seized on the street in 24, 2016 and bundled into the back of a getaway vehicle.
It ended when a local man saw her hands waving from the back of a white Renault Kangoo as he approached the vehicle.
British ex-soldier Philip Dutton, 52, went on trial on Monday for his alleged involvement in a botched kidnap attempt of a Riviera hotel heiress
Credit: Telegraph
The presiding judge praised her steely nerves and said: “Your nails were precious”. Mrs Veyrac had dug them into one of her assailant’s faces in an earlier kidnap attempt in 2013. The DNA found at the time could not be matched to anyone but it linked Mr Dutton, from Liverpool, to the second kidnapping.
In court, Mr Dutton, 52, admitted to involvement in both kidnappings.
However, none of the other defendants have pleaded guilty.
Mrs Veyrac’s son Gérard recounted to the court how the British former soldier, who the judge said had lied about his “long" SAS career when in fact he had spent three years in the army, had rang him to say: "Français pas bon, do you speak English?”
“You have a problem you must pay. Money, money,” he remembered him saying.
“No conversation anymore,” was the last he heard of the kidnappers until his mother’s release. Due to a technical problem, two text messages with the €5 million ransom request and meeting point never reached the family.
“They treated her like a piece of furniture,” said Mr Veyrac.
Testifying for the first time on Friday, Mrs Veyrac gave a calm and dignified account of her 48-hour hostage ordeal and her refusal to accept food or drink as she was held bound and gagged in a white Renault Kangoo on the outskirts of the southern Côte d’Azur city.
“I was coming out of the chemists. I had been shopping. It was midday, half past twelve. It was very fast. They took me away in the Kangoo. Straight away they used and threw me rather roughly,” she said.
British ex-soldier Philip Dutton is among 13 on trial in Nice for a botched kidnap bid on hotel heiress Jacqueline Veyrac
Credit: VALERY HACHE/ AFP
The masked and gloved kidnappers took her handbag, telephone. “They didn’t talk very nicely,” she told the court, saying one threatened: “Shut up, shut it or I’ll finish you off,” one told her. She was not allowed out to go to the toilet or even given a bucket.
She played down her ordeal, saying: “Baron Empain had it worse. I’m lucky.” She was referring to Baron Edouard-Jean Empain, a Franco-Belgian industrialist held hostage for two months in 1978 during which he had a finger chopped off.
Mrs Veyrac managed to free herself at least once but was rebound even tighter before a local man detected her presence and police were called.
Asked whether Mr Serena could have been behind it, she said: “Yes I think so.”
He denies the charges of complicity in kidnapping and attempted organised extortion.
In a coup de theatre, the alleged mastermind stood up to make an impromptu apology to his former boss on Friday.
“I have been thinking of you these past four years in prison and thinking that my mother could have been in your place,” he told Mrs Veyrac. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me and all these people who may have done you harm. I’m sorry and kiss you. Thank you Aunt Jacqueline. That’s what I used to call you.”
However, when the prosecuting judge Annie Brunet-Fuster asked whether this was an admission of guilt, Mr Serena said: “The guilty man is not here.”
Another man, Enrico Fontanella, 67, an old friend who prosecutors alleged Mr Serena had contacted to help organise the kidnapping, will be tried separately for health reasons.
Both Mr Serena and Mr Dutton face life in prison.
The trial continues.
Свежие комментарии