Roma boy beaten to a coma in Paris identified by wife in Romania

Pamela stared at the photograph for a minute, her face impassive, then looked up and nodded. “Yes,” she said. It was her husband, the father of her two children, slumped unconscious in a supermarket trolley, his body limp and his face swollen and bruised.

He had been attacked on June 13 in a suburb of Paris. One of France’s 20,000 Roma, Gheorghe Cordovan – initially known as Darius – had the misfortune to be caught by a braying mob that had accused him of burglary, then set out to punish him, beating him into a coma. 

Newspapers and television stations across the world reported on the lynching that left the 17-year-old fighting for his life, but it was two weeks before Pamela, herself a teenager and living in Romania, finally got to see the gruesome pictures, as The Telegraph asked her to confirm his identity. 

She stood holding his photocopied picture in one hand and carrying a baby in her other, while a crowd of excited villagers swarmed around in the desperately poor Roma settlement where she lives, on the edge of the Romanian village of Gepiu, near the border with Hungary. 

She appeared unsurprised at the grim fate of her estranged husband.

“He was living here, we were neighbours at first, we were friends,” she said, describing how she met her husband. “I didn’t stay a long while with him. He left long ago.” 

The Roma, Europe’s largest ethnic minority estimated at around 12 million across the continent, have suffered centuries of abuse and marginalisation, and were rounded up and sent to Nazi death camps during the Second World War. 

The attack on Gheorghe provoked outrage in France and in Romania, with François Hollande, the French president, denouncing it as an “unspeakable and unjustifiable attack on all the principles on which our republic was founded”. 

A march in support of the boy was held on Friday in the Paris suburb of Pierrefitte where he was lynched, the latest in a series of demonstrations over the attack for which no arrests have been made.

Despite the outpouring of anger, there is no sign of any change in the French government’s controversial policies towards the country’s Roma community. 

Most come from Romania and Bulgaria and often live in squalid camps on wasteland by the sides of motorways or canals, without running water or electricity.

Locals accuse them of theft and burglary. In Paris, some are known to run gangs of children who operate as pickpockets around tourist sites.

The mayor of the village of Gepiu, as well as Roma neighbours of the camp where Gheorghe lived in Paris, said he was one of the minority of Roma who were taken to France to burgle houses, pick pockets, or beg on the streets. 

Critics say that the French government is doing little to bring youths such as Gheorghe – who was abandoned by his parents as a child and grew up in a children’s home before taking to a life of petty crime – and the wider Roma community into mainstream society. 

The current Socialist government has pursued controversial policies begun under the previous conservative administration of Nicolas Sarkozy, demolishing Roma camps and sending many of the people who lived in them back to their home countries. 

Manuel Valls, France’s prime minister, came under stinging criticism late last year when, as interior minister, he said most Roma in France had no intention of integrating and should be deported. 

Le Monde newspaper echoed the widespread criticism of the government in a damning editorial that said the attack on Gheorghe was “the result of several years of inefficient public policy which maintains the misery of these Roma communities and allows the racism latent in French society to prosper”. 

Gheorghe’s wife Pamela may have revealed little emotion when shown the photograph of her battered husband, but the other Roma people in her village were furious. 

“This is injustice!” said the teenager’s uncle, Veres. “They have beaten him and left him disfigured. They could have broken his leg or something, but this!” 

The uncle said the family wanted Gheorghe, who doctors say is responding well to treatment in the Paris hospital where he is being cared for, to return to Romania when he gets better.

“He stole, I understand ... But why didn’t they take him to prison? Why did they destroy him?” asked an outraged woman in the village.