Two men jailed in France for robbery of footballer Donnarumma
The Paris Criminal Court in France handed prison sentences to two men in the case of the violent robbery of Italian Manchester City goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma and his partner Alessia Elefante in July 2023. As Al Jazeera English reports, the footballer was playing for Paris Saint-Germain at the time of the attack.
Sentences in the case
Ilyas Kerbouche, 21, whom the source describes as the organizer of the robbery, was sentenced to nine years in prison and fined €80,000. Co-defendant Mokhtar D received five years in prison, with two years suspended subject to a probation period.
A third defendant, 22-year-old Hyan M, was acquitted. Prosecutors suspected that he may also have directed the robbery from a prison cell. During the hearings, Kerbouche and Hyan M denied involvement in the crime, despite messages and images found on phones they used while in custody.
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Attack in a Paris apartment
The court heard that on the night of July 21, 2023, four masked men entered the couple's ninth-floor apartment in a building on Avenue Montaigne in central Paris via the rooftops. Donnarumma and his then-fiancée were dragged from bed, separated, tied up and threatened with a knife.
According to the court, the footballer was beaten with gloves fitted with hard knuckle pads, while Elefante was strangled with a phone charging cable. Donnarumma estimated that a group of seven people, some of whom have not been identified, stole cash, jewelry, watches and luxury bags worth just under €1 million.
Mokhtar D, who was the only defendant at the scene of the robbery, said he had only acted as a lookout on the roof of the building opposite the apartment. Elefante later suffered a miscarriage that was linked to the trauma of the attack.
