For several weeks during the summer of 2025, men frequenting the Beaulieu nature park, in Nantes, were victims of assaults and robberies. A 19-year-old man has just been sentenced to four years in prison, two of them suspended.
The events took place in June and July 2025 in Beaulieu Nature Park (formerly Crapa), known as a gay cruising site. Sophian M., a 19-year-old man, was sentenced this Monday, September 7, to four years in prison, two with probation, by the Nantes criminal court for several homophobic assaults and robberies with violence.
Several men claim that the defendant “attracted” them toward “the back of the park” by suggestive gestures and “unequivocal” looks, before assaulting them. A victim recounts having run into the defendant in the park, a stick in hand. His attacker then demands his wallet and strikes him several times with his tree branch. Another man explains having been strangled as well as receiving several blows to the face.
A “very specific” place
Interrogated in July 2025 as a new assault had just been reported, the young man was also convicted of “rebellion” at the time of his arrest. Tried for about ten offenses including five homophobic assaults, he acknowledged during the hearing “the thefts and violence” while asserting that the facts had “in no way” been committed “because of the victims’ sexual orientation”. Explaining that he had “a need for money”, he admitted having targeted the park in question because he knew it was a meeting place.
Depicting a man “on the hunt” in a place “a very specific”, the prosecutor had requested four years of imprisonment for him, including one year of probation. The defense lawyer, Me Samy Robert, stressed during his plea that his client’s criminal record, who apologized several times in court, was clean before the commission of the facts. However, according to Ouest France, he has since been sentenced to eighteen months in prison without parole for two knife blows to the chest of a fellow inmate, on October 18, at the detention facility where he was held in provisional detention.
