French rugby players accused of rape in Argentina set off for Paris as closely watched case drags on

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Two French rugby players charged with aggravated sexual assault in Argentina headed back to France on Tuesday, nearly two months after their stunning arrest in the South American nation.

The French national team players, Hugo Auradou and Oscar Jegou, wheeled their luggage through a frenzy of news cameras in the Buenos Aires International Airport ahead of their midnight Air France flight back to Paris. Addressing reporters from the departure hall, their lawyer hailed their flight home as a victory and described their experience in Argentina as ''a horror movie that never should have existed."

''This is a super, super important first step, it's perhaps more important even than the dismissal because the authorization to leave the country means that the legal system of Mendoza trusted the work that we did,'' attorney Rafael Cuneo Libarona said, referring to the courts in the western city where the alleged assault took place on July 7.

''I'm very happy to have defended boys with a high degree of innocence against the crude accusations that were made against them," he said. The athletes have denied the allegations.

An Argentine court in Mendoza last month ordered their release from house arrest and, on Monday, authorized the 21-year-old athletes to return home even as their trial grinds on.

The harrowing testimony of a 39-year-old Argentine woman who alleged she was beaten, choked and repeatedly raped by the rugby players in their luxury hotel room has transfixed the professional rugby world and shined a light on what critics call a toxic male culture in elite sports.

The French Rugby Federation welcomed the court's decision to let the athletes leave, saying it wanted to listen to the plaintiff but justice demands that the athletes enjoy the presumption of innocence.

Auradou and Jegou admit to having sex with the plaintiff — whom they met at a Mendoza nightclub following their team's victory against Argentina's Pumas — but insist the encounter was consensual.

The plaintiff says that the athletes took her back to their hotel room where they abused her and kept her against her will. Soon after she filed a criminal complaint, the players were taken into custody while their team traveled onto Uruguay to continue its regional test tour.

A judge in Mendoza approved the decision to allow Auradou and Jegou to return to France on Tuesday, rejecting the accuser's request for the defendants to undergo further psychological tests.

On Aug. 12, a month after the arrest of Auradou and Jegou, the case against them appeared to crumble as the court ordered them freed from house arrest, highlighting a number of apparent contradictions in the plaintiff's testimony that undermined the prosecution's faith in its ability to present a viable case.

The plaintiff's lawyers have requested the dismissal of the prosecution's investigators to no avail, accusing them of lacking objectivity and failing to consider the case ''from a gender perspective.''