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CRIME

French police probe knife attack for anti-Semitism

A young Jewish woman has been stabbed in her home in the French city of Lyon, prosecutors said, suspecting anti-Semitism as the motive for the attack.

Published: 5 November 2023 10:49 CET
French police probe knife attack for anti-Semitism
The residential building where a Jewish woman was stabbed at her home in Lyon. Photo: PACHOUD/AFP.

Police are treating the attack as attempted murder, they said, adding that the woman’s life was not in danger and no arrest had been made.

“This act could have anti-Semitism as its motive,” the prosecutors’ office in the southeastern city said late Saturday.

A police source told AFP that, according to the woman’s statement, she opened her door to a person who rang the doorbell and then stabbed her twice. Dressed in dark clothes and with their face partly concealed, the attacker then fled the scene.

A swastika — a symbol much used in Nazi Germany and by neo-Nazis —  was found scrawled on her door, the source said, but police had been unable to determine whether it had been put there ahead of the attack.

The regional branch of the CRIF, the representative council of Jewish institutions in France, quickly condemned the stabbing, saying it had “prompted great concern in the Jewish community”.

CRIF president Richard Zalmati also urged “caution”, saying it was up to the judiciary to determine whether there had been an anti-Semitic motive to the attack.

The victim’s lawyer, Stephane Drai, told the BFMTV broadcaster that her family’s Jewish faith was known in the neighbourhood.

Since an attack by Hamas against Israel on October 7 that left 1,400 dead, there have been 857 anti-Semitic acts in France, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said last week, and 425 people arrested.

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CRIME

Suspects in Paris Holocaust memorial defacement fled abroad: prosecutors

French police have tracked three suspects in last week's defacement of the Paris Holocaust memorial across the border into Belgium, prosecutors said.

Published: 22 May 2024 16:32 CEST
Suspects in Paris Holocaust memorial defacement fled abroad: prosecutors

The suspects were caught on security footage as they moved through Paris before “departing for Belgium from the Bercy bus station” in southeast Paris, prosecutors said.

Investigators added that the suspects’ “reservations had been made from Bulgaria”.

An investigation was launched after the memorial was vandalised with anti-Semitic image on the anniversary of the first major round-up of French Jews under the Nazis in 1941.

On May 14, red hands were found daubed on the Wall of the Righteous at the Paris Holocaust memorial, which lists 3,900 people honoured for saving Jews during the Nazi occupation of France in World War Two.

Prosecutors are investigating damage to a protected historical building for national, ethnic, racial or religious motives.

Similar tags were found elsewhere in the Marais district of central Paris, historically a centre of French Jewish life.

The hands echoed imagery used earlier this month by students demonstrating for a ceasefire in Israel’s campaign against the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza.

Their discovery prompted a new wave of outrage over anti-Semitism.

“The Wall of the Righteous at the Shoah (Holocaust) Memorial was vandalised overnight,” Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo said in a statement, calling it an “unspeakable act”.

It was “despicable” to target the Holocaust Memorial, Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) wrote on X, formerly Twitter, calling the act a, “hateful rallying cry against Jews”.

French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the act as one of “odious anti-Semitism”.

The vandalism “damages the memory” both of those who saved Jews in the Holocaust and the victims, he wrote on X.

“The (French) Republic, as always, will remain steadfast in the face of odious anti-Semitism,” he added.

Around 10 other spots, including schools and nurseries, around the historic Marais district home to many Jews were similarly tagged, central Paris district mayor Ariel Weil told AFP.

France has the largest Jewish population of any country outside Israel and the United States, as well as Europe’s largest Muslim community.

The country has been on high alert for anti-Semitic acts since Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel and the state’s campaign of reprisals in Gaza in the months since.

In February, a French source told AFP that Paris’s internal security service believed Russia’s FSB security service was behind an October graffiti campaign tagging stars of David on Paris buildings.

A Moldovan couple was arrested in the case.

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