Two French rugby players charged with aggravated sexual assault in Argentina have headed back to France, nearly two months after their arrest.
The French national team players, Hugo Auradou and Oscar Jegou, wheeled their luggage through a frenzy of news cameras in the Buenos Aires International Airport ahead of their midnight Air France flight back to Paris.
Addressing reporters from the departure hall, their lawyer hailed the players’ flight home as a victory and described their experience in Argentina as “a horror movie that never should have existed”.
Referring to the courts in the western city where the alleged assault took place on July 7th, lawyer Rafael Cuneo Libarona said: “This is a super, super important first step, it’s perhaps more important even than the dismissal because the authorisation to leave the country means that the legal system of Mendoza trusted the work that we did.
“I’m very happy to have defended boys with a high degree of innocence against the crude accusations that were made against them,” he added.
The players have denied the allegations.
An Argentine court in Mendoza last month ordered their release from house arrest and, on Monday, authorised the 21-year-old athletes to return home even as their trial grinds on.
The harrowing testimony of a 39-year-old Argentine woman who alleged she was beaten, choked and repeatedly raped by the rugby players in their luxury hotel room has transfixed the professional rugby world and shone a light on what critics call a toxic male culture in elite sports.
The French Rugby Federation welcomed the court’s decision to let the athletes leave, saying it wanted to listen to the plaintiff, but justice demands that the athletes enjoy the presumption of innocence.
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