A former US embassy employee was sentenced to life behind bars Thursday for repeatedly raping two desperate teen girls while he was working at the embassy in Burkina Faso, the feds announced.
Fode Sitafa Mara, 41, an American citizen, was employed at the US Embassy in the impoverished West African country when he repeatedly sexually assaulted the two girls, age 13 and 15, over the course of a year, prosecutors said.
Mara was employed at the embassy in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in 2022 and 2023, living in taxpayer-funded embassy housing near the girls’ squalid slum, which had no running water, prosecutors said.
He forced his vulnerable victims to keep having sex with him by claiming he could only help their mom – who had a life threatening disease – if they gave him something in return, the feds alleged.
He gave the girls a phone so he could contact them to come over when his wife was at work. After he tried to get his housekeeper to lie to investigators to help him keep his crimes under wraps, the feds claimed.
Mara was convicted by a jury in October of aggravated sexual abuse of a minor, attempted coercion and enticement of a minor and attempted obstruction of justice.
Maryland federal Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby threw the book at him Thursday.
“The defendant, while representing the U.S. government abroad, violently sexually abused two acutely vulnerable child victims,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva said in a statement.
“His crimes were reprehensible. While no sentence could undo the harm he caused, today’s outcome demonstrates that those who abuse children – domestically or abroad – will face significant consequences in the American justice system.”
