PARIS — Alarm is spreading on dance floors
in
France following needle attacks on dozens of young people in nightclubs,
with police in the dark as to the assailants’ identity or motives.
اضافة اعلان
The victims, who are mostly women, report the sudden
onset of identical symptoms — nausea, dizziness, and sharp pain — while out
partying, and only later detect a needle prick on their skin, a red dot
surrounded by a blue circular bruise.
Returning home from a night of dancing in April in
Nantes, western France, 21-year-old Eloise Cornut had a sudden onset of “cold
sweat, nausea, shivering and dizziness”.
The beauty parlor apprentice felt better the next
day, but a colleague noticed a needle prick in the back of her arm.
“It was a red dot with half an inch of blue bruising
around,” she told AFP.
Cornut, who doesn’t drink or take drugs and only
goes out at weekends, said she quickly realized that the needle attack must
have happened during her Saturday dance outing.
Her colleagues urged her to file a police report and
get a blood test.
‘Totally stresses me out’
“I now have to wait five
weeks before I can get an HIV test,” she said. “That totally stresses me out.”
Since early April, police have been dealing with
around 60 such cases reported in nightclubs, a police source said, with the
true number likely much higher.
The gendarmerie, France’s paramilitary police force
mostly active outside of large cities, said it was not able to give any
countrywide figures yet, as the data had not been sufficiently evaluated.
Some 45 cases have been reported in Nantes since
mid-February, according to prosecutors.
Complaints were also filed in the western city of
Rennes and in areas of France’s south, the southwest, the French Alps and the
Atlantic coast.
Blood tests have not revealed the presence of GHB,
known as “liquid ecstasy” or “date rape drug”, a substance that potential sex
assailants sometimes mix into the drink of their victims, prosecutor Renaud
Gaudeul said.
Lab tests had also failed to establish the presence
of any other toxic substance, and nobody had been arrested, he told AFP.
Experts caution, however, that GHB disappears from
the bloodstream without trace within hours after being administered.
One police source said the needle attacks were
sometimes followed by a sexual assault, and sometimes not.
‘Big bruise, red dot’
In Roanne, a picturesque
town in the Loire valley, an 18-year-old woman who asked not to be named was
celebrating a friend’s birthday in a disco.
When she accompanied a friend to the toilet, a man
groped her bottom.
“When I got home I checked in the mirror and there
was a big bruise with a red dot on my right buttock,” she told AFP.
Her friends later told her that they had noticed a
man staring at her in the disco “as if he was waiting for something to happen
to me”.
Doctors immediately gave her preventative treatment
for HIV and hepatitis.
Roanne police are investigating the incident for
“pre-meditated violence and the pre-meditated administration of a harmful
substance”.
A similar probe was launched following a complaint
by a young man in his 20s, who reported a needle stab in his shoulder in the
same disco on the same night.
The phenomenon has been spreading to music
festivals, such as the Printemps de Bourges in central France, one of the
country’s biggest music gatherings.
After nine complaints from festival goers, police
there also launched an investigation into “administration of harmful
substances”, without having been able so far to find any culprits or determine
exactly what devices were being used.
“We don’t know whether we’re looking for syringes or
whether they’re using simple pins,” said Agnes Bonjean, chief of staff to the
prefect of the Cher region where Bourges is located.
“It really hurt,” said Noemie, 23, who was stabbed
“in the thigh, right up to the sciatic nerve” during a night out in
Beziers,
southwestern France, and immediately rushed to hospital by friends after nearly
losing consciousness.
The public prosecutor in Beziers, Raphael Balland,
told AFP that 15 complaints had been filed there, of which 14 followed attacks
that happened over a single night, from April 17 to 18.
Contacted by AFP, prosecutors in Paris said that six
investigations had been launched since last week in the capital.
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