A passerby heard banging coming from behind a garage door, on a downtown street in the southern French town of Bourg-lès-Valence and was able to free two women. On Friday, February 6, after an ordeal that lasted more than 24 hours, the victims, a 35-year-old woman and her 66-year-old mother, were found in a state of shock, having been “tied up and gagged,” according to a police source at the scene. Emergency services transported them to the town’s hospital center, and their “lives are not considered to be in danger at this stage,” the same source said.
The story was first reported by Le Dauphiné Libéré, though the news had already been leaked on the morning of February 5. The leak related to criminals abducting and detaining two people, likely in connection with a ransom demand. Strict instructions were given to treat the matter with extreme caution, according to a judicial source who spoke on Thursday evening, due to “a high risk of serious harm to the physical integrity of the abducted persons.”
At around 3 am on Thursday, an unknown number of individuals broke into one of the victims’ homes in a small town located 90 kilometers from Bourg-lès-Valence and forced the two women into a Mercedes-Benz vehicle before fleeing.
An alert was immediately issued, and investigators found that the front door of the residence had been forced open and discovered bloodstains at the scene. The investigation quickly intensified the pressure on the case, as one of the two abducted women was found to be a judge who was recently promoted to the appeals court in the Alpine city of Grenoble, and the other was her mother.
While these initial elements raised concerns that the criminals had targeted the judge because of her profession, another clue led the judicial police investigators to a very different line of inquiry: The judge’s partner is an entrepreneur who has been active in the cryptocurrency sector since the late 2010s. The partner is the co-founder of a consulting startup that in 2024 was acquired by a major North American platform.
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