Scandal in the French Parliament.

A centre-right senator, Joë l Guerriau, is accused of having drugged a deputy to rape her.

The 66-year-old man, according to a reconstruction , invited the woman, Sandrine Josso, 48, his friend for years, to his house and offered her a drink by secretly adding ecstasy to the glass with the aim of obtaining from her « sexual favors."

The centrist felt bad, then reported him and had him arrested. The politician, affiliated with former prime minister Edouard Philippe's "Horizons" party, is in custody. Elected since 2011 in Loire-Atlantique where he is the esteemed mayor of the small town of Saint-Sébastien-sur-Loire, he denies everything : «The confrontation with the deputy - said Rémi-Pierre Drai, his lawyer - allowed my client to confirm with force the version of events which at this point of the investigation does not allow us to hypothesize any crime".

According to Josso, that evening Guerriau "had strange behavior", he reconstructed before the investigators. He looked at her insistently, inviting her to "party" together. Twenty minutes after taking the first sip from the glass that had been offered to her, she said she felt sick : cold sweat, rapid heartbeat. He was scared, but decided to hide his discomfort from Guerriau, calling a taxi to go home and leaving at 10pm . She had herself taken to Parliament, explaining the situation to some colleagues, who called for help: the first tests confirmed that the deputy had dilated pupils and a high heart rate.

At the hospital, tests confirmed the presence of ecstasy in his system . The analyzes on him strengthened the suspicions: traces of amphetamines, opiates, cannabis, cocaine, methadone and Mdma were found in his blood . The police, according to French media, have already carried out searches at the senator's home, where ecstasy was found, and also in his office in the Senate. To place him in custody it was not necessary to wait for the request to suspend his parliamentary immunity since the investigation was opened in flagrante delicto. In the Senate, Guerriau also holds the position of vice-president of the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Armed Forces commission.

A banker by profession, he was in the past general director of the Federation of Savings Banks. He was talked about once again for an episode that was never fully clarified: in 2016, a response to his colleague senator Bruno Retailleau accompanied by a photo of a penis was published on his Twitter account. Then Senator Guerriau justified himself by stating that his account had been hacked.

(Unioneonline/D)

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