15-year-old Jewish girl aggressed near Paris while returning from school

PARIS—A 15-year-old Jewish girl was aggressed in Sarcelles, a suburb north of Paris,  as she was returning from the private Merkaz-Hatorah high school in Raincy.

The teenager was attacked by an individual in his thirties who slashed her face by surprise before fleeing.

“A man in his thirties came up to her and slashed her right cheekbone,” said the victim’s mother.

“The individual who arrived in front of the young woman, gave him a blow with a sharp object, without speaking a word to her,” said a source close to the file.

The girl did not see her attacker, who fled just after the attack, and could not give a report, according to the police.

According to daily Le Parisien, the family filed a complaint at the Sarcelles police station.

“It sounds like a gratuitous assault, she had no outside sign that she was Jewish,” a police source told the newspaper.

“She was in uniform, wearing a shirt and a blue skirt, there is no evidence that this is an anti-Semitic aggression, but we ask ourselves the question,” the mother said.

Former Sarcelles mayor, Francois Pupponi, a member of the parliament,  denounced what he called “an odious act of anti-Semitism”, rejecting the first assumptions of the police.

“I have no doubt that this aggression is anti-Semitic, and in the face of these acts it is absolutely necessary to stop being naïve,’’ he said.

In Sarcelles, where a large Jewish community lives, ‘’everyone knows who is a practicing Jew,’’ he said, because of their clothing attributes and delinquents also know it. An individual slicing the face of a young girl with a knife, while she is dressed like many women of the Jewish community, leaves no room for doubt,” he wrote on Facebook.