Two charged with anti-Semitic murder of elderly French Jewish woman
Tue Mar 27, 2018 01:47:pm World
3K By Obiaks Blog
French prosecutors have charged two people, one of them a neighbour, with the murder of an 85-year-old Jewish woman, who was stabbed and whose body was then set alight in a crime being treated as anti-Semitic.
Mireille Knoll, who escaped the mass roundup and deportation of Jews from Paris during World War II, was found dead in her bed in her small apartment in eastern Paris on Friday by firefighters called to extinguish a blaze.
An autopsy showed she had been stabbed several times before a fire was started in the apartment.
The two men charged with her murder have also been charged with aggravated robbery and damaging property. They were taken into custody.
The death of the frail octogenarian described by a neighbour as very quiet has shocked the Jewish community, coming a year after an Orthodox Jewish woman in her sixties was thrown out the window of her Paris flat by a neighbour shouting "Allahu Akhbar" (God is greatest).
Jewish groups called for a silent march in her memory Wednesday afternoon in Paris, which several politicians planned to attend.
One of the suspects is a neighbour in his twenties who visited her regularly, according to her family.
A police source said the suspect had a previous conviction for sexual assault.
The second suspect, aged 21, has a history of violent robbery.
He was in the apartment building on the day of Knoll's death and his name was given to police by the first suspect, a police source said.
Pictures of Knoll circulated on Facebook showed a woman with lively brown eyes and bobbed hair.
Philippe, another neighbour who often met Knoll out on her daily walk, described her to France Info radio, as "very quiet" but "cheerful".
On Monday, investigators said they believed her killing was anti-Semitic.
A source told AFP that statements by one of the suspects and the fact that both knew Knoll was Jewish led them to conclude that the murder was motivated by her religion.
"She was a woman of modest means," her family's lawyer, Gilles-William Goldnadel, told AFP. "There was absolutely nothing of value to steal," he said.
From across the political class, statements of shock and indignation poured in.
Reacting on Twitter, President Emmanuel Macron condemned the "dreadful" killing and reiterated his determination to fighting anti-Semitism.
- Escaped deportation -
Knoll managed to escape the notorious 1942 roundup of more than 13,000 Jews in Paris by fleeing with her mother to Portugal when she was nine.
After the war she returned to the French capital and married a Holocaust survivor, who died in the early 2000s.
The CRIF umbrella grouping of French Jewish organisations on Monday urged "the fullest transparency" by the authorities investigating Knoll's murder "so that the motive of this barbarous crime is known as quickly as possible."
Last month, a judge confirmed that the April 2017 murder of Sarah Halimi, the woman who was thrown out of her window, was motivated by anti-Semitism.
Jewish groups had reacted angrily to the investigators' delay in declaring that killing an anti-Semitic act.
Halimi's murder reignited the debate over anti-Semitism in working-class districts in France, where Jews have been targeted in several deadly jihadist attacks in recent years.
France's half-a-million-plus Jewish community is the largest in Europe but has been hit by a wave of emigrations to Israel in the past two decades, partly due to the emergence of a virulent strain of anti-Semitism in predominantly immigrant neighbourhoods.
In 2011, an Islamist gunman shot dead three children and a teacher and a Jewish school in the southwestern city of Toulouse.
Four years later, an associate of the two brothers who massacred a group of cartoonists at satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo killed four people in a hostage-taking at a Jewish supermarket in Paris
AFP
Mireille Knoll, who escaped the mass roundup and deportation of Jews from Paris during World War II, was found dead in her bed in her small apartment in eastern Paris on Friday by firefighters called to extinguish a blaze.
An autopsy showed she had been stabbed several times before a fire was started in the apartment.
The two men charged with her murder have also been charged with aggravated robbery and damaging property. They were taken into custody.
The death of the frail octogenarian described by a neighbour as very quiet has shocked the Jewish community, coming a year after an Orthodox Jewish woman in her sixties was thrown out the window of her Paris flat by a neighbour shouting "Allahu Akhbar" (God is greatest).
Jewish groups called for a silent march in her memory Wednesday afternoon in Paris, which several politicians planned to attend.
One of the suspects is a neighbour in his twenties who visited her regularly, according to her family.
A police source said the suspect had a previous conviction for sexual assault.
The second suspect, aged 21, has a history of violent robbery.
He was in the apartment building on the day of Knoll's death and his name was given to police by the first suspect, a police source said.
Pictures of Knoll circulated on Facebook showed a woman with lively brown eyes and bobbed hair.
Philippe, another neighbour who often met Knoll out on her daily walk, described her to France Info radio, as "very quiet" but "cheerful".
On Monday, investigators said they believed her killing was anti-Semitic.
A source told AFP that statements by one of the suspects and the fact that both knew Knoll was Jewish led them to conclude that the murder was motivated by her religion.
"She was a woman of modest means," her family's lawyer, Gilles-William Goldnadel, told AFP. "There was absolutely nothing of value to steal," he said.
From across the political class, statements of shock and indignation poured in.
Reacting on Twitter, President Emmanuel Macron condemned the "dreadful" killing and reiterated his determination to fighting anti-Semitism.
- Escaped deportation -
Knoll managed to escape the notorious 1942 roundup of more than 13,000 Jews in Paris by fleeing with her mother to Portugal when she was nine.
After the war she returned to the French capital and married a Holocaust survivor, who died in the early 2000s.
The CRIF umbrella grouping of French Jewish organisations on Monday urged "the fullest transparency" by the authorities investigating Knoll's murder "so that the motive of this barbarous crime is known as quickly as possible."
Last month, a judge confirmed that the April 2017 murder of Sarah Halimi, the woman who was thrown out of her window, was motivated by anti-Semitism.
Jewish groups had reacted angrily to the investigators' delay in declaring that killing an anti-Semitic act.
Halimi's murder reignited the debate over anti-Semitism in working-class districts in France, where Jews have been targeted in several deadly jihadist attacks in recent years.
France's half-a-million-plus Jewish community is the largest in Europe but has been hit by a wave of emigrations to Israel in the past two decades, partly due to the emergence of a virulent strain of anti-Semitism in predominantly immigrant neighbourhoods.
In 2011, an Islamist gunman shot dead three children and a teacher and a Jewish school in the southwestern city of Toulouse.
Four years later, an associate of the two brothers who massacred a group of cartoonists at satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo killed four people in a hostage-taking at a Jewish supermarket in Paris
AFP
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