Two in court in Paris over killing of 85-year-old Jewish woman
Two men have appeared in court in Paris charged
with the antisemitic murder of 85-year-old Mireille Knoll, who in 1942
escaped from France’s most notorious second world war roundup of Jews.
Yacine
Mihoub, 31, and Alex Carrimbacus, 25, who met in prison while serving
sentences for robbery, violence and sexual assault, are accused of
stabbing Knoll to death and setting fire to her apartment.
They
could face life imprisonment if convicted of what court documents
described as the culpable homicide of someone “they knew to be
vulnerable owing to her physical condition, and which in addition was
carried out because of her Jewish faith.”
Knoll,
who lived alone and had Parkinson’s disease, was killed in March 2018, a
year after the killing of another Jewish woman in Paris, Sarah Halimi,
65, who was thrown out of the window of her home. The attack on Knoll raised further questions about France’s failure to tackle antisemitism.
Both suspects blamed the other for Knoll’s death and have repeatedly
changed their stories. “It will take a miracle for the truth to come out
of their mouths,” said Gilles-William Goldnadel, the lawyer for the
victim’s son, before the start of the trial.
Goldnadel said the evidence against the pair was
overwhelming, describing the killing as “heinous antisemitism”. Knoll’s
son Daniel told journalists outside the courtroom that the men were
“monsters” and that relatives expected “a very severe sentence”.
He
told RMC radio he was not sure if he would be able to turn the page
even after the verdict. “I hope afterwards I will feel liberated. But I
don’t know,” he said. “We wait to know the truth, but I’m not sure we
are actually going to get it.”
Knoll fled occupied Paris for Portugal with her mother at the age of nine, narrowly escaping the Vél d’Hiv roundup of Jewish families carried out by French police on behalf of the Nazi authorities.
About 13,000 people, including more than 4,000
children, were herded into the velodrome in Paris’s 15th arrondissement
before being moved to internment camps including Drancy, northeast of
the capital, in 1942. They were then deported to Auschwitz, from where
fewer than 100 returned.
The French president,
Emmanuel Macron, attended Knoll’s funeral in 2018 and said at the time
that her killers had “murdered an innocent and vulnerable woman because
she was Jewish … and in doing so profaned our sacred values and our
history”.
Firefighters found Knoll’s partly burned body in
her homecare bed in her council flat in eastern Paris. She had been
stabbed 11 times, mainly in the throat, an autopsy established.
Carrimbacus,
who has no fixed address and a history of mental health problems, told
investigators after his arrest that Mihoub, the son of one of Knoll’s
neighbours who had known the victim since childhood, had called him
about a “money scheme”.
According to the police report read out in court, Carrimbacus claimed
Mihoub slit Knoll’s throat while crying “Allahu Akbar” after a violent
argument in which he accused her of having called the police about his
behaviour some years previously.
Mihoub said Carrimbacus had immediately sought to
rob Knoll, asking if she was “rolling in it”. Magistrates decided to
treat the killing as an antisemitic hate crime after Carrimbacus said
Mihoub had “talked about Jews’ money, their wealth”.
The
investigation also found that Mihoub had an “ambivalent” attitude
towards Islamic extremism, prosecutors said. But Mihoub’s lawyer,
Charles Consigny, said the motive of antisemitism “only exists because
Carrimbacus invented a motive … and the prosecutors weren’t brave enough
to drop it in the face of public pressure”.
The
killing was the latest in a series of attacks that have heightened
concern about how rising Islamic extremism is fuelling antisemitism. In
2012 an Islamist attacker shot dead three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse. Three years later a gunman killed four people at a kosher supermarket in Paris, days after 11 people died in a massacre at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. And in 2017 Halimi was killed by a neighbour shouting “Allahu Akbar”.
France’s highest court ruled in April
that Halimi’s killer, Kobili Traoré, was not fit to stand trial because
he had had a psychotic episode caused by cannabis use, prompting Macron
to demand a change in the law to ensure people who commit violent
crimes while under the influence of drugs could be held criminally
responsible.
