The fact that the victim was a Holocaust survivor reignited the debate about the increasing violence in France against Jews
Since Tuesday, two men have been sitting in the dock at the Palace of Justice in Paris for the murder of Mireille Knoll, a Jewish retiree, in her apartment in the French capital in 2018. This crime shocked France and reopened the debate about growing anti-Semitism in the country.
Knoll, 85, with Parkinson’s disease, was found dead in her apartment on March 23, 2018. An autopsy revealed that she had been stabbed up to eleven times before her home was burned down. Firefighters discovered the body when they went to put out the fire. His body was partially charred.
The woman, who lived alone in a social apartment in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, was a Holocaust survivor. He managed to flee Paris in 1942 with his mother and escape the anti-Semitic raids that led many French Jews to die in Auschwitz. They took refuge in Portugal thanks to their father’s Brazilian passport. “I hope there will be a severe sentence, the harshest possible,” said his son, Daniel Knoll, before the start of the trial that will last until November 10.
The two main defendants are Yacine Mihoub, 31, and Alex Carrimbacus, 25. According to the indictment, it is an anti-Semitic crime. If found guilty, they could face life in prison. Mihoub and Carrimbacus, who met in prison, are charged with the voluntary murder of “a person who they knew to be perfectly vulnerable given his physical and mental state” and for the fact that “the victim was of the Jewish religion”. They are also charged with “aggravated robbery” and “degradation by means dangerous to persons”.
Knoll had known Yacine Mihoub since he was a child because they lived in the same building. Mihoub’s mother, a neighbor of the victim, is accused of having allegedly cleaned the murder weapon.
Mutual accusations
The trial should clarify what exactly happened that day in Knoll’s apartment. The two main suspects accuse each other of having murdered the old woman and of setting the apartment on fire. According to Carrimbacus’s version, Mihoub slaughtered the victim shouting “Allah is the greatest.” He denies it and accuses Carrimbacus of the crime.
The murder of this octogenarian French Holocaust survivor shocked the Jewish community in France and abroad. A large “white march” was organized in Paris in memory of the victim. French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged then that Knoll was assassinated “for being Jewish.”
The crime rekindled in the debate in France about a growing Islamist anti-Semitism in France, a Judeophobia of Arab-Muslim origin, especially violent in the case of radical Islamism. This murder occurred a year after that of Sarah Halimi, another 65-year-old Jewish woman who was thrown out of the window of her home in Paris by a young Muslim neighbor with psychiatric problems in 2017.
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