French police have been granted an extra 48 hours to question Tariq Ramadan without charge.
The Professor of Islamic Studies at the university was arrested on Wednesday during a preliminary investigation after two women accused him of rape and sexual assault last October.
A judicial source confirmed this morning Prof Ramadan’s custody had been extended for a further 48 hours in order to give Paris police more time to question the suspect, after which he should either be freed, formally charged, or made an “assistant witness”, meaning police do not believe he committed an offence.
Prof Ramadan took a leave of absence from Oxford after the allegations came to light but the Swiss professor vehemently denied raping the two women.
He has since filed a complaint for slander against feminist author and former Salafist Henda Ayari, one of his accusers.
Mrs Ayari said the academic raped her in a Paris hotel room in 2012, while his second accuser – a 42-year-old Islam convert whose identity has not been revealed – claimed he raped her in a Hilton hotel in Lyon in 2009.
Mrs Ayari, who waived her right to anonymity last year, first mentioned the rape in a book she published in 2016 – in which Prof Ramadan’s name was not mentioned.
She later told French media the sex scandal involving Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein had encouraged her to “name and shame” her alleged abuser and file an official complaint with police.
The Islam expert took to Facebook to deny the accusations, saying the rape claims were nothing but a “campaign of lies” launched by his “adversaries”.
Prof Ramadan, who is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood revivalist movement, has also been accused of sexual violence by four Swiss women – his former pupils – who claim he harassed them and forced them into sex when he worked as a teacher in Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s.
The women made the claims during an interview with the Swiss newspaper La Trubune de Genève last November.
Following the interview, Prof Ramadan tweeted: “Anonymous allegations have been made against me in Geneva, accusing me of the abuse of students who were minors nearly 25 years ago.
“I categorically deny all these allegations and am today filing a complaint against X for libel.”