Two decades on the run ended after a boating accident. A French fugitive, sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for a double murder, has been arrested in Indonesia after his boat suffered damage from a storm, putting an end to his run.
Thierry Ascione, 62, and a compatriot had to dock on October 3 in the Talaud Islands, located between the Philippines and Indonesia, to seek help to repair their sailboat. Authorities arrested them for illegal stay in Indonesia, local police chief Lendi Hutabarat said on Thursday. “Their navigation system was damaged due to the strong waves”, the official told AFP in Talaud.
Thierry Ascione was hiding in his boat when the police questioned and arrested his compatriot who was trying to get a SIM card on the island. Police then visited the boat and found the fugitive without a passport. The two men were arrested and then transferred to immigration authorities. They are now in the city of Manado, north of the Celebes.
Novly TN Momongan, immigration official for neighboring Sangihe Islands, confirmed the detention of the two French people, adding that the fugitive had tried to conceal his identity by ensuring that his passport had been stolen in the Philippines. “The French Embassy has issued a request for legal aid for the arrest of TA who is on the Interpol red list in connection with a murder case”, said the official, designating the fugitive by his initials.
Sentenced in 2001
Thierry Ascione was sentenced in 2001 in France to life imprisonment. He is considered to be the organizer of the assassination of a couple of French restaurateurs, Bernard and Antoinette Béreaud, in Guatemala in December 1991. On the run after the events, he was arrested at Roissy airport in Paris in 1995, then released on parole in 2000 but disappeared six months before the start of his trial. The Paris Assize Court sentenced him to life imprisonment in absentia.
Since that time he has lived in several countries and most recently in the Philippines. He was trying to sail to New Caledonia to receive health care, according to a source familiar with the matter, before seeing his two-decade run end in Indonesia.
Thierry Ascione was already “Known to the police” in France, where he was sentenced to seven years in prison after a hold-up in 1983. Released in 1989, he left for Latin America (Venezuela, Panama, Colombia, Brazil), then went to Guatemala to the fall 1991, where he prospected on behalf of a French transport vehicle company, Fabre. He converted into business to try to sell trucks to the military junta. It was during this activity that he got to know Jean-Philippe Bernard, the main accused of the double murder, whom he met in the latter’s restaurant. Then from Bernard Béreaud, and his wife, with whom he dines frequently.
Ascione had left Guatemala City, the capital of the Central American country, just after the double murder, in January 1992, for Miami. He had emptied the bank accounts of the victims, before leaving for Asia and changing identity multiple times by stealing tourist passports.
If the motivations for the murder of the Béréaud couple remain unclear, Thierry Ascione, in his depositions and successive statements, has always defended himself from any responsibility. In 1995, he claimed to have had a business relationship with them, which would justify cashing checks in Miami. According to him, the case would be a settling of scores in a drug trafficking case in which very high personalities of Guatemala, in particular military dignitaries, would be involved. He even believed that Jean-Philippe Bernard “Had been the victim of a plot”.