French police have made a shocking international appeal for victims and witnesses in the ex-teacher child abuse case spanning across five continents from the 1960s to 2022.
Jacques Leveugle, a 79-year-old former teacher, had been accused of a case of raping and sexually assaulting 89 children globally.
Police in Grenoble said Leveugle, who has been in pretrial detention in France since April 2025, was a "textbook example" of a serial sexual offender in a disturbing case involving countries from Germany to India.
The Grenoble prosecutor, Étienne Manteaux, said Leveugle had also confessed to killing his terminally ill mother and later his elderly aunt by suffocating them with pillows.
Appealing for potential victims and witnesses to contact French police, Manteaux said Leveugle had worked with children in Algeria, Colombia, India, Germany, Switzerland, Morocco, Niger, the Philippines, and the French overseas territory of New Caledonia from the 1960s to 2022.
Despite never securing an official teaching qualification, Leveugle had worked as an educator since the 1960s. He also worked as a sports monitor in canyoning and speleology and in youth camps.
Moreover, he worked with young offenders in Germany, took many tutoring jobs and was an educator in a children's home in Bogotá, Colombia.
The appeal was accompanied by pictures of Leveugle at different ages and highlighted the countries he had been living in.
Leveugle was placed under formal investigation in France in February 2024 for aggravated rape and the sexual assault of minors and has been held in pretrial detention since last April.
The case centres on Leveugle's own writing about his activities with children, which investigators said he compiled in a digital "memoir" found on a USB drive by a nephew and turned over to authorities.
Prosecutors say the 15 volumes of texts written by Leveugle had enabled investigators to identify 89 alleged victims, boys aged 13 to 17 at the time of the alleged assaults, from 1967 to 2022.
The French police have called for witnesses and victims to come forward, as they need to conclud the investigation in 2026.
