French
police arrest founder of website used by Dominique Pelicot
Isaac Steidl
being held over site used by criminals including man convicted of recruiting
strangers to rape his wife
Kim Willsher
in Paris
Wed 8 Jan
2025 20.04 GMT
The founder
of the website used by Dominique Pelicot to recruit strangers to rape his wife
has been arrested in France.
Isaac
Steidl, 44, is being interviewed by Paris detectives over the use of the
website by criminals involved in more than 23,000 crimes including rape, murder
and paedophilia.
France Info
radio said Steidl reported to police on Tuesday morning after being summoned
from his home outside the country and agreeing to fly back to Paris. He can be
held for questioning for up to 96 hours.
The Coco
website was shut down by the French authorities in June 2024 when an
investigation was opened.
The website
hit the headlines after it was revealed that Pelicot, 72, had used a Coco
chatroom called A son insu (without their knowledge) to recruit more than 80
men to rape and sexually abuse his wife, Gisèle, 72, who he had rendered
unconscious with a cocktail of prescription drugs.
In December,
a court in Avignon sentenced Pelicot to 20 years for drugging and raping his
wife and inviting strangers to rape her at the couple’s home in the Provençal
town of Mazan between 2011 and 2020.
Pelicot was
stopped after he was caught filming up the skirts of shoppers in a local
supermarket.
Another 50
other men identified from the tens of thousands of videos and photographs
Pelicot made of the abuse of his wife and discovered on his hard drive were
also convicted and sentenced to between three and 15 years. Seventeen men have
appealed against their convictions.
The website
has also been named in other criminal investigations. In April last year a
22-year-old man was beaten to death by a group of young men near Dunkirk after
he arranged to meet what he believed to be girl under the age of 18 through the
site.
French media
reported that Steidl created the website in 2003 with help from his parents
with an investment of €2,000 shortly after he graduated as a computer engineer.
It was allegedly intended as a platform for romantic meetings but it quickly
attracted the attention of drug dealers, paedophiles and sex offenders. After
Pelicot’s arrest, the French site was transferred to a URL registered in
Guernsey in the Channel Islands.
Police say
they have frozen €5m in bank accounts linked to the site in Hungary, Lithuania,
Germany and the Netherlands.
Steidl, who
was born in southern France, is reported to have given up his French
nationality in 2023 and taken Italian citizenship. He is said to have been
living in eastern Europe.
Ordering the
shutting down of the website last year, Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor
said it was implicated in 23,051 criminal cases involving 480 victims. In a
statement she said a man of Italian nationality, born in January 1980 was
“suspected of being the administrator of the site” and had been questioned by
magistrates in Bulgaria.
Le Parisien
reported that Steidl is being questioned on allegations of “the unlawful
administration of an online platform as part of a criminal organisation,
criminal conspiracy and complicity in offences and crimes related to aggravated
procuring, the distribution and sharing of pedophile videos and money
laundering”.
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