Nordahl Lelandais tried on appeal for sexual assault of a second cousin

The appeal trial of Nordahl Lelandais for the sexual assault of a minor second cousin in 2017 opened on Wednesday, February 26, 2024 in Reims , behind closed doors, as during the first instance trial which resulted in a one-year prison sentence in early 2024.

Nordahl Lelandais - who has since adopted his mother's maiden name, Périnet - has already been serving a life sentence since 2022, with a 22-year security measure, for the kidnapping and murder of eight-year-old Maëlys at a wedding party in Isère in August 2017. He was also tried for sexual assaults on two little cousins ​​aged four and six during the same summer.

Also read Maëlys trial: life imprisonment requested against Nordahl Lelandais

Nordahl Lelandais, 42, was also sentenced in 2021 in Chambéry to twenty years in prison for the murder of the young corporal Arthur Noyer, whom he had picked up while hitchhiking in April 2017. The case of the sexual assault on one of his second cousins ​​in the Ardennes in March 2017, the day of the funeral of the father of this 14-year-old girl at the time, is the only case in which Nordahl Lelandais appealed, contesting the facts.

He arrived at the Reims Court of Appeal on Wednesday around 12:30 p.m. from his prison in Ensisheim (Haut-Rhin), under heavy police escort, wearing a black jacket, light shirt and short hair. The victim was not present at the hearing. Her absence is "a protection for her" , because she knows that Nordhal Lelandais is challenging her accusations and the hearing at first instance in Charleville-Mézières had been "very heavy and very painful" for her, the young woman's lawyer, Maître Arnault Monnier, stressed to AFP on Wednesday.