Media lawyer Juan Branco was arrested at the Senegalese border on Saturday August 5, 2023.
On Saturday August 5, an unexpected event shook the Senegalese political scene with the arrest of lawyer Juan Branco in Rosso, on the border between Senegal and Mauritania. This arrest was confirmed by a Senegalese police source, reports Le Monde. Images broadcast in the local press show the lawyer, dressed in a khaki fisherman’s outfit, aboard a canoe. Juan Branco is known to be part of the team of lawyers for the Senegalese opponent Ousmane Sonko, whose sentence to two years in prison for “corruption of youth” in a sex scandal had aroused strong reactions. On June 22, following Sonko’s conviction, Juan Branco had filed a complaint in France and a request for an investigation at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, accusing the Senegalese President, Macky Sall, of “crimes against the ‘humanity’. These accusations had provoked a strong reaction from the Senegalese justice system which announced, on July 14, its intention to issue an international arrest warrant against Juan Branco for “crimes and misdemeanors”, linked to the riots which had broken out in the country after conviction of Ousmane Sonko. Since the announcement of the arrest warrant, Juan Branco was actively sought. On July 30, he created a surprise by appearing at a press conference of his colleagues in Dakar, after having entered Senegal clandestinely.
Currently, Juan Branco is being transported to Dakar, where the prosecutor will have to decide his fate: deportation to France or placement in pre-trial detention. Along with the arrest of Juan Branco, the Senegalese authorities are also looking for several people suspected of having helped him during his stay in Senegal. Among those arrested is lawyer Babacar Ndiaye, a member of Ousmane Sonko’s party, who is currently in police custody for harboring criminals in the Branco case. On Thursday, Alpha Bocar Khouma, mayor of Sangalkam, was also arrested for arranging accommodation for the Franco-Spanish lawyer in a hotel at Lac Rose, according to Senegalese media sources.
The lawyer has been the subject of a handrail deposit since April 29 from a 20-year-old young woman. The statements of the young woman had prompted the Paris prosecutor’s office to entrust an investigation for acts of “rape” to the 1st DPJ. According to the first elements of the investigation and the statements of the victim, the young woman and the lawyer would have first exchanged on Instagram messaging before meeting. Juan Branco evokes a first physical meeting in the alleys of the Luxembourg garden after messages on Instagram. He then describes a rather romantic ride, kisses. The couple would then have gone to the lawyer’s home in the Montparnasse district where they would have watched a film before having sex. On Facebook, Juan Branco explained in a long message: “We hesitated a lot, I wanted her too, we said so, several times, and at one point I asked her if she wanted, and she said yes, and we did what two people in these circumstances would do” explained the lawyer. She told me it had gone too fast (…) I reminded her that we wanted each other, that we hadn’t stopped talking, that there had been no coercion, that if she s felt bad, we would have immediately stopped everything (…) She apologized, told me that she understood that I did not understand her”.
In an interview with Point on May 1, the accuser explained for her part that the lawyer had offered to take drugs. “He offered me lamaline, an opiate. Around midnight, we took it,” she said. She also explained that she had rejected the young man several times before he achieved his ends. “I was afraid that he would become violent,” she says.
Juan Branco, 31, is a media lawyer, best known for having defended the Russian artist Piotr Pavlenski in the case of the broadcast in 2020 of the sexual video of the former government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux, candidate for mayor of Paris. He also defends Christophe Dettinger, the boxer filmed hitting two gendarmes during act 8 of the “yellow vests”, or even the yellow vest Maxime Nicolle, who is nicknamed Fly Rider. He is also the author of an anti-Macron pamphlet “Crépuscule”, published online at the end of 2018 and then Au Diable Vauvert/Massot in 2019.
