UK TelegraphFrench footballers Franck Ribéry and Karim Benzema have been placed under formal judicial investigation over allegations they paid an under-age prostitute to sleep with them.
Zahia Dehar has told vice squad officers that she hadsex with three players Photo: KCSPresse / Splash News
Franck Ribery Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Franck Ribery and Zahia Dehar Photo: REUTERS/REX FEATURES
Mr Ribéry, the Bayern Munich star, appeared before an investigating magistrate in Paris on Tuesday after being questioned for six hours by vice squad police along with Karim Benzema, the Real Madrid striker.
Both players have been have been placed under formal judicial investigation.
The players were detained as part of an investigation into claims the Zaman Café, a chic Champs-Elysées nightclub, provided clients with minors working as call girls. Mr Ribéry's brother-in-law and an unnamed football agent were also questioned.
Mr Ribéry, 27, is alleged to have paid thousands of pounds to have a Moroccan-born call girl flown to Germany to spend the night with him when she was 17 – below the 18-year legal age for prostitution in France.
Zahia Dehar now aged 18 years and four months, has already testified to investigators that she had sexual relations for £1,500 per night with Mr Ribéry in 2009, while she was still under age.
She said she had paid sex with Mr Benzema, 22, in 2008, when she was just 16, and a third French player, 30-year-old Panathinaikos winger Sidney Govou, in March, when she was an adult. Miss Dehar has insisted the players did not know she was a minor.
In an interview with Paris Match, she claimed Mr Ribéry had put her on a first class flight to meet him in a five-star hotel on his 26th birthday on April 7 last year.
"I was Ribery's birthday present," she said. "Franck approached me in a Paris club. He booked me and flew me to Munich to celebrate his 26th birthday.
"He made reservations at a luxury hotel in Munich. We had sex and he paid me. I was a lovely little present, wasn't I?" In a letter to France's then national football coach, Raymond Domenech, Miss Dehar pleaded with him not to drop the winger from France's World Cup squad, saying he was unaware of her age.
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